Jack Collom

Why & what is sweetness all alone? Either that or it becomes, alas, fleeting, Which actually helps, because of rhythm. & there’s a pale intensity to truth, no matter How pale it is on the levels we receive on. I mean, the minute you invent a time interval The more it seems to “jelly out” the excitation Of accidents;zum Beispiel, “Saginaw, Michigan.” After a while, we almost expect him or her To inveigle us into a cafe without bay-breasted warblers. It’s almost like we have a streak of orange-smell Which nobody’ll pay for because they can’t talk to it, Although that’s probably all wrong, or at least falsified By its very mention, like gravity. Do you agree?

9:13 p.m., Lucky Bock in hand, I inscribe: walked the lovely 33 blocks to school today, streets clear and thick melting snow all around. taught my 4 hours of poetry; the afternoon class was hard; kid named Schweikert kept on fucking up. took typed-up poems of yesterday to Platt and put up poster there of Anne and Reed’s reading Sat. ate nearly 2 peanutbutter sandwiches with raw carrots. typed. read kids’ poems. at 4 I started home, got a ride with Jim Bay. press release to daily paper. stopped in Baird’s for 2 beers, looked at paper. home, kissed Mara, Sierra. in the mail: Out There, from Chicago, and a letter stating the city of Grand Island had decided not to prosecute re my arrest Friday for intoxication. wonder why. Nick the landlord didn’t show (he was supposed to have us sign lease on the new duplex) (this place gonna be torn down). ate a very delicious supper, ham-and-cheese rarebit with cold broccoli and cold oregano’d tomato, cooked by Mara. paperwork, played a game of solitaire, harried by Sierra’s new red car. dropped over then to the Korner Bar, put up a poster under the phone sign, said hi to a few folks and got halloo’d by this guy I’d spoken to 2 months before, who’d said his high school son adored me, but it might be thought improper that I hang around, shoot pool in Korner Bar. a beefy mid-30’s man, he bought me a beer, apologized and told me of his luck: he’d won a thousand one-hundred eighty dollars today betting on one horse at Fonner Park. we talked of poetry, family, work — he mentioned Kilmer, Stevenson, Nash and others, quoted verbatim his own published poem on fire-fighting (he is the G.I. fire-chief). his boyhood favorites, whom he reads all of even now: Edgar Rice Burroughts and Jules Verne. his son, though epileptic, does the high jump at the high school; he was disturbed that it wasn’t the broad jump, in which he himself still holds a record, set in 1959. the taxes have jumped up like crazy on their nice spread just inside the city limits. I got up and slapped him on the back and left, stopping first to ask Clark, standing end of the bar, what he knew of me on Friday night at the Kyriss. I’d blanked out completely (woke up in jail, ate blue oatmeal). he said I’d just got drunk, he thought Rod had taken me home. he said, at one point, just waking up, I’d grabbed the edge of the table and tilted it till the glasses all came sliding down and almost off, then tilted it back till they slid back to where they were, and never spilled a drop. he said I’d bought some beers for him and Pat but before they could get to them drank them up myself. okay, Clark, you’re a good guy with your black curly hair and toothless grin, and your wild life. I was just wondering. check with Rod when have a chance. — and off, through mud and occasionally-lighted puddles, home, where Mara’s napping still and there are (were) 5 Lucky Bocks in the white (today!) icebox. 9:50. (no. 2) after finishing that (immediately after, during, in fact) the strange thing is there’s so much left out. last night finished reading The Vicar of Wakefield. the bluejays and cardinals that called on the way to school. my beard suddenly seems soft (that thought off some day-dreaming about talking to poetry students). reread (for the last “making” time) “the 14,” the magazine; it is all set. the poems there, here now, seemed so abstract, compared with what I’m used to, but that in a way intensely and properly shaking feeling and talk, tonight. the revolution (Mara gets up, starts drinking Pepsi) and all that. (yellow sweater).

It is all kind of lovely that I know what I attend here now the maturity of snow has settled around forming a sort of time pushing that other over either horizon and all is mine in any colors to be chosen and everything is cold and nothing is totally frozen soon enough the primary rough erosion of what white fat it will occur stiff yellows O beautiful beautifully austere be gotten down to, that much rash and achievement that would promote to, but now I know my own red network electrifying this welcome annual hush.

Surrounded by bone, surrounded by cells, by rings, by rings of hell, by hair, surrounded by air-is-a-thing, surrounded by silhouette, by honey-wet bees, yet by skeletons of trees, surrounded by actual, yes, for practical purposes, people, surrounded by surreal popcorn, surrounded by the reborn: Surrender in the center to surroundings. O surrender forever, never end her, let her blend around, surrender to the surroundings that surround the tender endo-surrender, that tumble through the tumbling to that blue that curls around the crumbling, to that, the blue that rumbles under the sun bounding the pearl that we walk on, talk on; we can chalk that up to experience, sensing the brown here that’s blue now, a drop of water surrounding a cow that’s black & white, the warbling Blackburnian twitter that’s machining midnight orange in the light that’s glittering in the light green visible wind. That’s the ticket to the tunnel through the thicket that’s a cricket’s funnel of music to correct & pick it out from under the wing that whirls up over & out.

(for the Barteks) up at 7, dress & cook an egg black with pan soot, eat with hot bread and butter binoculars, book, notebook, 2 baloney sandwiches & a peanutbutter english sparrows singing as I walk to Hotel Yancey pigeons wheel above grand island coffee & the world-herald Saturday 7:30 in their elegant warm cafe Vera Coons comes in her green car we pick up her friend Bea while speaking of Canada geese I hear a cardinal startling, we see a cardinal crows flying we’re driving south on highway 281 cornfields, bright day, temp. 21 hit the Platter Restaurant where George Stoppekotte sits in his pickup he climbs in, we all sit & talk & wait for Bill Schleicher “if they take all the water out of the Platte River, by God, we folks here are gonna sit with our fingers dry” Bill comes with Harley Kandish, shuffle around George & Bill lead off in the pickup, Harley rides with us cross the Platte, gray with ice sunlight heading west sparrow hawk on a low fence “when you talk about wild asparagus, those 2 guys spot it where no one else does” we stop, check out black blobs in the trees, George says they spotted wild geese a magpie, we all drive on — I train my binocs on the passing trees (black Angus in bright yellow corn) stop again, geese “ — put a spot of salt in everything she made” “your dipstick’ll boil that oil eventually then you can’t get the darn varnish out” 2 ducks — scaup? goldeneye? meadowlark in a tree we see an eagle white-headed, gargantuan, in cottonwood by river back — we drink coffee — high spirits — everybody talks at once of Spanish peanuts — postum — people killing eagles being sick — where we’re going — once Harley saw an eagle & a bluebird & a beaver all in the same spot in Colorado & another eagle! closer perched upright, dark-bodied turning its arctic head in the light drive on ducks (buffleheads?) on Bufflehead pond hundreds of geese flap into a field & mass there giant trucks whiz by we’re 49 miles from grand island, turn south pass piles of mallards in a pond goldfinches lilt by turn east pass restored Fort Kearney hey — great horned owl on a telephone pole now he’s sitting on a haystack! “there was a crippled pelican down on Steen Lake a long while” I’ve got pelicans on my socks stop & piss in a refuge Bill says “we saw an immature on a haystack once & he was dead — not a wound on him. maybe he at a poison mouse” thought I heard a woodpecker pecking but it was the pickup cooling off — but there is a fat little downy there, we look — english sparrows out here sounds erupt like a whale under the pond ice stop for lunch here last baloney sandwich, Vera’s coffee, cigarette at a red picnic table by the pond & more sandwiches, pickles, from Vera chickadee sings talk “there’s something about a deer — couldn’t shoot one” “this was back when the Prince of Wales toured the country, they entertained him at Swift & Company. my sister-in-law was secretary to Old Man Swift. well she saw the Prince standing there looking forlorn & took a glass of water up to him & asked if he was thirsty and he was” “I was Secretary of Equitable Finance for 47 years” talk of city politics & economics & ecological considerations, & we leave, drive east glittering corn 3 mergansers on a pond fly off another eagle Platte River iced with curving channels open brown islands, everywhere shit, beautiful round brick barn young bald eagle flapping & soaring up — 2 more, sitting in trees — another, white-headed, closer, sits in massive stillness, then takes off! soars! flashing snow light from tail & head — drive a bit, stop & 3 more are seen sitting among strings & bunches of brown ducks that continually pour into & out of some body of water there “majestic” we say in such majesty so multiplied still majestic in so much left & right of ducks? drive on blue lake changes from brown to silver as we pass “there’s somebody’s little broken dream” we walk into a sanctuary Bill hands out peanuts in the shell points out diamond willow (chipping sparrow), through woods I climb green tower & look out upon islands & channels of the Platte “that’s alkali, you put your finger in it & lick it & it’s just like salt” badger hole wild plum “I don’t stomp em, I just throw em in there stems & all” “ — that’s due process” back to the car — banana, chocolate warm day now talk about Greeks fixing lamb — too much midafternoon, sit & talk motors start “sunflower” “cherry wood” talk, east again loggerhead (?) shrike flies off flicker meadowlarks all over sides of the road chipping sparrow with his white line over eye, black-bordered chestnut cap George saw 7 robins in a tree nothern robin in a russian olive paved road windmills walk to river & scan black spots — all nests blue ice, blue sky straggled brown horizon white posts in the river purple & yellow black hawk hovering over a field marsh hawk?  no, red-tail — fox squirrel way off gray cliffs of snow in the ditch 2 hairies on a post “I wanted to go up to Baribou to see the circus museum” pumphouse with purple shingles shrike goblin shapes of field wood panoramic freight train view nameless little town wave at man burning stumps talk of water & we slowly drive through country wide cornfields keep us from the trees the eagles sit in “I just always have lip-ice” 2 hawks — complex identification discussion, or debate, and I maintain: ferruginous rough-leg nearing doniphan roads zigzag along the cardinal directions following slow northward Platte curve eagle again — flapping & soaring across our path, distant — field of lemon yellow cooling off, sunlight graying Swainson’s hawk above our heads, says Vera “there’s a policeman’s car & it says ‘Whites’ live there” ... “now they collect interest instead of apples” back to the Platter people split off north into city nearly five o’clock clouds lit yellow-gray in the west twelve eagles in our wake & legions not seen, motionless on cottonwood braches they don’t care & I care but it’s ok “beautiful day” “beautiful day” looking into the sun makes it all seem light & dark home — mara & sierra fed ducks today sierra showed me her new blue car

(for Phil Garrison and Peter Lamborn Wilson) As ashes are the shadow of smoke, panic is the shadow of light, beef the shadow of grass, love the shadow of attention, psychology the shadow of plastic the shadow of oil the shadow of giant ferns the shadow of bacteria the shadow of light’s grandmother, rosy finch the shadow of loon, jealousy & myth twin shadows of desire, Europe shadow of a desert river, idea the shadow of pain, sleep the shadow of bread, liquid the shadow of lust, time the shadow of et cetera, logos is the shadow of what happens. Take some broad-shouldered little fart, at las- t, fresh from the 5 o’clock (morn) shadow of barbarism, squatting over barley-paste, hot goat, dried fig (meal the shadow — since the shadows were removed from rocky Grecian hills, trees cut away, soil reduced to olive grounds — down to shadow of surroundings — of Homeric heaps of meat that cast deadanimal-shaped shadows by the tents on the sandy shores of Ilium) squatting over his shapeless shadow in the shadow of the Parthenon — itself shadow form from wood, “in the light of” stone. Well now, there’s been some organized ruckus in his medium, rare town, which, God knows, nobody there “thought” would survive, a golden paradigm, for thousands of Apollonian twirls. Who knows what they thought of what they thought? It must’ve been intensely local; that the universe crept into valley code was just brain refreshment. Dirt was all around. Some bright body shambled the streets — in mud & heat — barely shook his bald, Why is the sky blues into registration, virgin ears & experienced buttholes, as the shadow of estrangement from a bloody dream’s red tape, & got chemicaled, but Mr. Broad Wit seized evaporation from the street to isolate spirit of spearmint from what had always gone before. Summer was a-comin’ in still (Lawdy! sing coo-coo!), facts & symbols be-danced & babblin’ beat of a million bovine feet upon the tender luxury sidewinding from the brain. So he thought “Thought!” Why not? Natural! in a sense. Never before had such perfect innocence been explored like new property. Well, such a new idea as “idea” looks pretty good till you can check out how it settles into the ground. Blood’s biodegradable but logos piled up like a plastic eyesore, fore- shadowed a bloodless dry reign, precipitation of pedestrain pedantry, pedestrian mind for millenia, postulating its pustulations of post- & pre-, professing everything, subjugating us all in the tick-tech burned-out success of a nob objectivity, turning babble to a soapy bubble up up & away until pop! goes the wizard. Aw c’mon, the alchemy that pilfers from golden sundance volumes of German silver sucks tongue of essence — ah yes, essence, with its can-do incandescence, like “Lovelight’s our leverage to spring some uptight average from alla this quotidian sewage &italicize it, boot it through the uprights to an airy footnote.” So anyway this guy imagined up God outa the play-dough of his panicked exclusions & then compounded the felony by trying to imitate the damn thing, double-indemnity solipsism in the fool’s guise of cool & wise utopian Republic! Razional! Sozialismus! Computerized zoosphere! Hologram rain forest — a more direct use of light. But despite all right & crystal wings, thinking that — “The-variability-of-the-world-has-no-more-reality-than-the-shadows-on-a-cave-wall”— has no more reality than Plato’s reflection in the waters of a Theater-of-Dionysus Port-O-Let. Well, he thought he was correting a mess & left a mess of shadows for our meat. If unity really strung out from above, not shot up from below, we’d have no babies to throw out with anybody’s rationalized bathwater. Islands in the stream of biosphere placidly gavotte drinking play-tonic sprinkled geo- metrically, until the teleology becomes archaic — & eats it too. The world pole-flips one more time, mechanically geo- mantric, shakes the pants off of objective dance to reveal gradual chance, just numbers having a ball, as the rationale of it all. Back up a hemidemisecond! My better half says — “In the winter the house is all shadow.” But the long hot summer of essentialism “was” a system of no resistance — & all the psychological shit that makes a toilet contemplative, inner-directed: a pure good-bye. Yet it was hard (abstract thought), difficult to invent, like anything you can’t immediately step on, phrase or foot — (& 4 is the shadow of 3 is the shadow of 2 is the shadow of 1 & old is the shadow of Jung & red is the shadow of orange & dots the shadow of dot & hand is the shadow of and however the shadow of breath & season the shadow of winter the step the shadow of the gesture & soprano is the shadow of the star & ring’s shadow is “orange” & window shadow of the shadow.) —after all, Empedocles & Anaximander had illuminated life as shadows of whatever, up from sea-slime, dissolving to the harmony of a sphere. Logos, in the light, is only haze, a honey-head, that the shape be kept as “beautiful.” (& the shadow structure is the real — it’s not being looked at nor still distorted by leftover rays in the shadowee, nor in such relation to light as shadowing implies: once you’ve taken in the light, you’re artificially simple for good — bedazzled. Chiaroscuro conjures up dichotomy — Step 1, then, as it loses all idea to total presence, becomes invisible enough. & we’re home. Lightning strikes — OK. Half-known moves around the kitchen. The cereal box is food for thought. Is it easier to be right when you’re already wrong? Hmm, cool today; better pull on my dark-blue paradigm. The quality of nothing is not strained, but saying so’s tense like a cartoon zebra. “The variability of the world” — incidental winks of it start to party into view — absolutely hot & cool, at the moment, is, & likely to remain so.) Eat a fig. Drink some coffee. Went driving today ’73 bug mid-Sunday plus live-in sweetie over littered subtle prairie out to Erie where we coffee smoke four baconstrips & country fries breathed in the work like hell old dirt streets & east to Firestone Screwball pool coke & ice Route 52 two dozen silver queen Indian corn Valmont Road yellow plum tomatoes cloudy light above Kiowa Peak stoplight bickyard pond by Public Service.