Joanne Kyger

When I used to focus on the worries, everybody was ahead of me, I was the bottom of the totem pole, a largely spread squat animal. How about a quick massage now, he said to me. I don’t think it’s cool, I replied. Oh, said he, after a pause, I should have waited for you to ask me. The waves came in closer and closer. When I fall into the gap of suspicion I am no longer here. In this world that has got closed over by houses and networks, I fly out from under the belly.     Life’s dizzy crown of whirling lights, circles this head.    Pure with wonder, hot with wonder.    The streets become golden.     All size increases, the colors glow, we are in myth. We are in easy understanding. Scarcely talking, thoughts pass between us. It is memory.    As I search to find this day’s sweet drifting.    The fog out to sea, the wind.

1. It unfolds and ripples like a banner, downward.  All the stories come folding out.  The smells and flowers begin to come back, as the tapestry is brightly colored and brocaded.  Rabbits and violets. Who asked you to come over?  She got her foot in the door and would not remove it, elbowing and talking swiftly.  Gas leak? that sounds like a very existential position; perhaps you had better check with the landlord. This was no better than the predicament I had just read about.  Now it was actually changing before my eyes.  Sometimes it will come to a standstill though, and finally the reflection can begin. Selfless—that was the proposition.  Smiling and moving instantly there was no other purpose than that which brought them there, to be in a particular place. 2. This time the mule gave its face away.  Take your cadillac where you want to go in the morning, convertible as it might be, and enjoy a good bottle of rum. Running on this way she used various modes of expression that were current.  Nothing seemed to bring the woods any closer. What Woods, she was questioned, realizing that as far as the woods went, they were largely inhabitable through the facility of her mind.  At the Philadelphia Flower Show, an ideal situation was built up.  Here through various regulated artificial conditions, spring grass, waterfalls, the newly-sprouted bulbs completed her ideal concept of nature.  The smell was overpowering. All right then.  She had a thing about nature, from flower show glamor and enormous greenhouses the rich cultivated. A beauty of cultivation—in living?  Hastiness did not prevent her from rising quick and ready to misnomers and other odd conclusions, throwing the telephone book to the floor, “OH OH the life I am entangled in.”  Four sides of it. Above was a paradisical level, incompleted.  With working possibilities. Below, endless preoccupations and variations were possible. Currently in vogue were shelves, the vacuum cleaner, a new bedspread and color scheme for pillows. Taste treats were unresponsive.  Glamor do’s were out.  Conversation was nil. Languid she could not even find a place to languish upon that was fulfilling in its own way. So out of the lifelessness that was around her, the grape leaves drying out, and even though the avocado was sprouting, she thought, Why not fantasy?  Tugging at this character and that, trying to push a little life in a prince or a charmer, a half- blind bat, dryad, the works of the story teller.  Here the four walls of the room and ceiling became apparent again.  “I ought to tighten down and make sure I say exactly what I mean.” And her face took on a tight pinched expression, and thrifty scotch economy gave her shrewd eyes in the prescribed way.  Use every tidbit,usefully.  Once upon a time there was a princess who had a long white fur coat with a high fluffy collar, and inside the coat were stitched beautiful butterflies in many bright colors. The princess languished.  She was not sure where to sit to her best advantage to enjoy herself the most.  She could not go in her mind or out.  She looked at her long white hand, I am the Queen of the High Mountain Hag, she murmured to herself, still knowing she was a princess.  She lay down upon the floor as if it were the garden of eden, the coat spread around her. No, that poor little house she had built was a bore.  It’s better that it go up in flames, as it did. She went down to Grand Central Station and gave away flowers. Some people took them and some people didn’t. 3. I’m glad to get back.  I had to repeat a rough discontinuous journey. Questioning myself all along the way.  Was I jumping on her because her time had come to an end.  Indeed I pounded on his arm all night, over his concern for this soft-spoken individual, I can see nothing but their softness.  Me ME, and the time we might spend together, reading and talking, to tear away that putrid husk. My flippancy is gone.  Now I have started my secret life again, in transition, reminding.  As the moth reminds, its feeble antenna groping, taken like a stalk of fern, coins of money. All over I was shaking as the fear and tension made itself apparent. It was a cold night out.  It was colder still between the airy gaps, between blankets. You can see she is thoughtful as she draws the string to the bow.  Where to go indeed.  The point is brought forward and discussed very cleverly. A sleeping angel or a sleeping troll?  I was rather proud of being used, pushing the clothing hampers up and down the downtown street.  Here, pleasant mentors conveyed their anxious solicitations, drawing from their bags, long lists of memorandum due, what I owed. It was a lot, if I hesitated.  I choose to go on, saying this is the way I go, owing nothing, being that kind of person.  Hung up? That thought intrudes as the clearly marked vista is not so clearly marked.  Certainly one supposes in all honesty, that an essential core of feeling blooms in each encounter.  Lost under the weight of the garbage of who are you that you are not making apparent. Thus unhappy, I don’t want it to be this way, and so forth. Not costumes, or paraphernalia, the immediate reactions. 4. We of course are in a family situation.  Anything I wish might happen, but the larger situations are not real, not to be considered possible, discussable as to what sense of reality they possessed. In the snow, the wood piled up underneath.  Oh those drifting sensibilities.  At this point it is scarcely believable that people gather and like each other.  Eating chocolate pudding, getting in touch with some other sense of alikeness.  The form is no longer obvious to me.  Whether they meander or are joined together in their senses in the mechanics or regular grooves they run along. I suspect that in this house, this place that is musty and left as it was some years ago, there is no real fear; the objects are old and I am not familiar with them, only the sense that the Ghost or spirit world strikes you with its familiarity, pleasurable fear. Here the familiar is apt to make its presence known, at any moment the unexpected lurk in the hall, into the room.  Pieces of leather, old silken fans laid upon the table top, rooms filled with something left unexpectedly terror is the wrong combination of ignorance.  It contains its own self with dusty fragments of velvet and fringe.  100 pieces of voice with no name, called it myself, as they spoke all day, sucking the soft slush, admitting their real deficiencies as— I am never sure; Oh it’s that power and disease of believing in the stale that doesn’t demand a real climate, takes its capacity when the demons come down. 5. The night passes in night time.  The head moving to the shoulder, the head rising with a frown. In a firm voice, it doesn’t matter if the hair is flying from undue spring breezes, the self has been raptured on the wine that produces appropriate madness, and sad she says, my dear the bacchanal is a lovely way to be rid of waste. However, in seeing the house more manageable, one cannot even have fear larger than the unknown portions of the continent which refuses to sink. There once was a woman who grew older, not that she minded, but the passage of time was always constant.  Why does one have to contend with that she said, puzzled, as she got carried along, and constantly had to think up new coping modes of behavior.  If he behaved to me thus when he was 40, now that I am 30, I can hardly behave like that to those that are 20, and so forth.  There wasn’t any model except the one she built, and one could scarcely believe there was no established pattern.  This offered wonderful possibilities, but also indecision and gutlessness. 6. You can’t see them, all bundled up, all those that choose to move other than where the distance seems appealing.  Knowledge has no depth.  There isn’t any message to be spoken. Wrangling, she speaks ill-advised my dear, as the cat has no point in laying its head down.  She ought to watch carefully. The claws.  It could be the bent hands, as they grow, that as the fur impeaches the rose, doesn’t make the thing she hangs her body on any realer. What could it be all about?  The necessity to follow, balancing, contemplating words, as the basis of why we move at all. Just a little touch.  The leader cautioned further progression. I could hardly listen to the music for long.  Now there seemed to be interruptions, pleasurable interludes, nothing definite, of a fragmented nature. Certainly I wished the best for all.  The sadder soldiers stumbled idly, as I also in the profound reaches of my slumber noted the elegant turns, the twisting statements grooving into the language building something to listen to.  The dress made from silk.  Trusting was awkward and not of a nature to ease any further building.  Whosoever you revere will come back tenfold upon you and lighten the burden carried as those who desire the warmth and necessity of communication. 7. I am sure my dreams must have been of the wrong sort.  However, as dreams are reflections of inner dilemmas, how did those arise, from a day of relaxation and summer enjoyment of the fund. Knowledge comes from what purported strike?  From that which cleanses, and let us knot say “heart” but tissue.  Hopefully and helpfully I have built up a language in which to talk myself to sleep.  Not for purposes of letting in the cold. However, I have found that not all blockaded against is the cold, the dreary reign of the dead, etc., and tasteless realm of the mushroom.  As much can be denied as the bilious sun strives to cause an enlargement of singing in the back of the neck and the head.  That is uncorraled ecstasy.  I call it enthusiasm, free energy. But it has no place to land, it is bursting and unfocused; it is a real force and the counterpart of the gloomy depths. As the pieces of the house ooze sap, blossoms and green twigs burst from the cracks.  Whether or not to join in what I was half committed to see and do. 8. At this point, when Jack picked up the pussy willow branches, I said they can’t possibly be ours for the taking, and smiled with dedication to an older Con Edison man.  The buildings were like the unexplored garbage in my mind, fascinating and dirty, pulling pieces of cloth from boxes left overnight.  Energy as limitless possibility, in the attempt to transmit non-energy situations. For example, if once I stop to realize what little gets through, I am much more interested in the cover than the contents; it is difficult to find any interest in anything.  Good energy displaces bad karma. And other non entities like that sort, producing flow that in its own place has a good bed, stocked well with what can be called fleet-footed fishes, and approaching places of investigation, such as relations between. As I saw the blood flow to the surface of his skin, I forgot to watch for the telltale visions that again might come from something I have never seen; more possibly the components of what every man views.  If this was a possibility, the rays from every person converging pass through the state of shock to numbness to unity without any mind at all, for this horror fits the cat on the stairs, between the fifth and sixth rung.  This is the way people glow and pulse similar to an inlet of jellyfish blocking the way, full of human life; until I who will name myself a swimmer come along and refuse to be blocked on the way, although I turn back gladly, and will again swim through for it is possible they do not kill, the sting’s compounded measure is fear, and thus one not need join the broad expanse of human mouths calling people to join their ranks to comfort their newfound recognition or orifices, stomachs and legs. I reminded myself twice there were several stories that kept continuing themselves.  She ignored her face, blotched and red upon times, but fuller.  Did you forget to wax and wane?  Her head was full of energy brought forward and positively that what was said would turn the obvious into color, but no sense.  Sense was for the thinkers.  Here the thinkers forgot their word orders or sense; it was better to give them coffee, and those off worse could smoke. I had felt very foolish when I leaned forward and grasped his hand, with effort, and his cloak slipped down over one shoulder as he shouted, which is the way.  And I followed for certainly no one would follow me.  As the day is cold and colder, and what comes out of the head is of its own sort and nature.  These words, like Nature, and Head, Thinking and Words, repeat themselves, as the lines of landscape, attics and other closed-off sections have reprimanded themselves by repetition.  Light was such an enormous possibility.  Taking sight into a frenzy, it was possible that just to look was full of excitement and wonder, for ages at a time, things appeared as beautiful, the sky, the street where cars had gone by. I worried about certain characters: ones that never seemed to be other than puzzles to me but I was drawn to them with certainty only because there seemed to be no understanding? As when the mysteries were performed, the house then itself became distilled with reason as the pots and pans were used apparently filled with the stuff of continuity.  The sorrow that each day sinks into the infertile other side of day, where voice comes out of the dark, and does its rituals.  Memory has its own screen across the room to view itself, and the continuous dwelling of conjecture takes permanent form in stiff-legged walks to remind, thus on and on the breathing goes. New York. January – March, 1967

The grasses are light brown and the ocean comes in long shimmering lines under the fleet from last night which dozes now in the early morning Here and there horses graze on somebody’s acreage Strangely, it was not my desire that bade me speak in church to be released but memory of the way it used to be in careless and exotic play when characters were promises then recognitions.  The world of transformation is real and not real but trusting. Enough of these lessons?  I mean didactic phrases to take you in and out of love’s mysterious bonds? Well I myself am not myself and which power of survival I speak for is not made of houses. It is inner luxury, of golden figures that breathe like mountains do and whose skin is made dusky by stars.

NOTES FROM THE REVOLUTION During the beat of this story you may find other beats. I mean a beat, I mean Cantus, I mean Firm us, I mean paper, I mean in the Kingdom which is coming, which is here in discovery. It is also Om Shri Maitreya, you don't go across my vibes, but with them, losing the pronoun. It is Thy, it is Thee, it is I, it is me. Machines are metal, they serve us, we take care of them. This is to me, and this is to you. You say you to me, and I say you to you. Some machines are very delicate, they are precise, they are not big metal stampers, She made enough poetry to keep her company. My Vibes. You intercepted my vibes. The long shadows, the long shadows, the long shadows. My sweet little tone, my sweet little tone is my arm. On what Only: The song that girl sang the song that girl sang

He is pruning the privet of sickly sorrow   desolation in loose pieces of air he goes clip clip clip the green blooming branches fall—‘they’re getting out of hand’    delirious and adorable    what a switch we perceive        multiple identities     when you sing     so beautifully     the shifting clouds  You are not alone is this world not a lone  a parallel world of reflection in a window keeps the fire burning in the framed mandala,  the red shafted flicker sits on the back of the garden chair in the rain the red robed monks downtown in the rain  a rainbow arises simple country      practices thunder lightning,  hail and rain    eight Douglas Iris ribbon layers of attention So   constant creation of ‘self’ is a tricky mess    He is pruning the loquat,   the olive which looks real enough in the damp late morning air May 15, 1995

In Tamalpais is a big crystal. An acquaintance told me the story. A Miwok was giving his grandfather’s medicine bag to the Kroeber Museum in Berkeley. He said this man took him over the mountain Tamalpais, at a certain time in the year. I believe it was about the time of the Winter Solstice, because then the tides are really low. They stopped and gathered a certain plant on the way over the mountain. On their way to the Bolinas Beach clam patch, where there is a big rock way out there. Go out to the rock. Take out of the medicine bag the crystal that matches the crystal in Tamalpais. And if your heart is not true if your heart is not true when you tap the rock in the clam patch a little piece of it will fly off and strike you in the heart and strike you dead. And that’s the first story I ever heard about Bolinas.