http://counterpathpress.org/videoed-readings-of-154-fortiesjackson-mac-low

http://counterpathpress.org/anne-tardos-reading-jackson-mac-lows-forties-42


when I come back to Jackson Mac Low's poems after a while away, I think first - it's nonsense! It's nonsense! And then I settle in and the language seems like clear water travelling, pooling, settling, shining brilliant on the surface then limpid to its depth, then jumbling and rushing on again. 

A beautiful day, a day of small completions. We moved in September but we've never quite finished moving. Bare walls, the odd box here and there. Today I put away the pictures I don't want to hang, got the others ready to hang, sorted through junk and knick-knacks, reordered my bookshelves to get stacks of books off the floor. Now I have a collection of photos and beloved things on top of the shelves - the reading light my poppa gave me, the small dragon from Nan with the coin in its mouth, the silver pocket warmer from N, the opera glasses from L. Photos of dear ones, the old pack of miniature tarot cards, the cup-cake pin-cushion sewn by A. The canasta cards from Auntie M, etc, etc. J & J gave us a photo they took in Malaysia before they left here - it's a table and chair in a bright verandah looking out to trees, a cat watching the trees - so that is on the wall now. One casualty of my orderings was the small photo R gave me last Christmas, of hands laid peacefully in a lap. I had found the right place for it - propped against the window in front of my desk, where it is just within my field of vision as I work - but I hadn't realised the window was leaking from the day of hard rain. Fifteen minutes later I noticed the (unframed) matt board was soaking up water. Only a little water had crept onto the photo. I have weighted it between paper towels. Maybe this will be enough to save even the matt.

I didn't repot any of the plants I bought yesterday - I want to give them a chance to adjust to the new light conditions first. But I cleaned out all the old pots and ordered things on the patio, and even threw out one of the money plants that had got rootbound. Perhaps I'll give away more of the money plants once I've done the repotting - they grow so easily and self-propogate, so they tend to take over. I hope I can keep the new plants alive. I chose a great variety of foliage, and I'm so happy to have them. The oxalis with its great purple false-clover leaves looks a little fragile, but we'll see.

I think this was the perfect new year's eve day. Ready for a new year.

I thought - I need to read a poem, because  I can't remember how they are written. What do people write them about? How do they begin? I resolved to write a poem like the first one I found on my bedside table, and it was this:

http://www.vqronline.org/articles/1996/spring/catullus-alberto-caeiro-fernando/

- or at least, the 'dirty unknown child' section. That is difficult, because it is close to what I saw today.

Bought no orchid, but a bromeliad, a couple of hanging succulents, and something spiky, drapy and flowering that I suspect is two or three plants in the same pot. There were wonderful strawberries in hanging baskets, and although they were hung in the shade, I was too suspicious to bring one home - probably would have carked it on our shady patio, and that would have been too sad. Oh and an oxalis with large purple leaves and little white flowers. I wish I had at least asked about the care of the strawberries.

As I was paying the cabdriver when I got home a Chinese boy of about 8 years old, with no front teeth, jumped in the taxi beside me and closed the door. The driver smiled, thinking I knew him, but I didn't. The boy didn't answer any questions or talk at all, just wriggled and laughed, leaned forward and tried to press buttons on the driver's console, to grab my money, and so on. He wriggled out of the driver's reach and into me, like he knew me very well. While I was putting away my change the driver came around and pulled him, gently enough, out of the car, chiding him that the police would get him. When I got out the boy grabbed my arm and started pulling me down the stairs to the apartment service area, but I didn't go, because my hands were full of bagged pot plants with many dangling fronds, which made them hard to set down. But I'm not sure I would have gone anyway. 

YL wants to translate some of my poems; I have to get a set together for him. Or, I've done this but I am stalling on sending it. It's hard, painful, to go through EVERYTHING and find so little.

SC asked for a 'crime' story ages ago for her journal, so I gave her the garden story, The Trappers, it's called at the moment. But she wants the story changed. The protagonist changes gender and then nothing is 'done' with that. I don't want to change it. I told her I couldn't, and I can't, so maybe she won't publish it now. She wants the officers to notice the gender change, to confirm that it is real. Why would I want to confirm that it is real? It is important but only important in exactly what it does. It gives the protagonist a particular proximity to the 'child'. Gender there is a function, not a condition. Or it's just one of the things that happens. It's not the meaning of the story, and I don't want the story to explain it or be explained by it.

There's the long, dead essay from a couple of years ago, rejected after months of work and now too outdated to use anywhere. A couple of dead conference papers. I said I'd turn one into an article, and as soon as I said that I locked up on everything. Soft Shroud too, which I loved, and now feels like a tangled, unsolvable problem, a mess. I can't speak, I can't be understood because I have some kind of speech impediment, whatever I say. This feels like what they call circling the drain. Self-pity in the ranks (there will be no self-pity in the ranks)

Woke in the night up against that wall and I decided that I had to jettison that agreement for the article just to get my spirit back. Yes, I can do that. Permission granted. It's me, my life, my own. And then the key turned in the lock - if you were to keep going with the article, here's what you should read, do, say... it needn't be a big deal, it is something you do, just what you do normally alongside everything else you do, not what is done to you, not a prison....

So I'm walking to the garden shop now, to think and to buy an orchid. 

boat notes 24/12 -

Morning. It's day but not yet 'sunrise' because of the cliffs. There's this one boat and I want it to go away, its engine pointing on my morning. A sea hawk is whistling and circling over my head, steering in tight circles with its tail and its wing tips. At the kayak station, flat yellow and green house on a barge, kids or tourists playing hackey-sack in silhouette. I woke in the night with relationship panic...
c'mon, c'mon, calls a raven in a cliff echo. Reveal your nest - reveal your nest -

We're moving, we're out of the cove now, sun's warming things up. A couple bail their fishing boat, and N gets his flash out. It's a tour, we're on a tour. Oil emulsifies near the rocks. Scrub on the cliff-sides. Dark grey planes with cream streaming and planing through it. Sun's gone, suddenly freezing. Children swimming to school because their family can afford no boat. How do you survive in a floating fishing village with no boat? Sudden cold winds. Boat hands without boats. Sometimes teachers pick up the kids in their boats and take them to school.

On the piers ladies sell pearls, fake pearls? Smartly dressed, urgent. I lie back in the sun above a city of boats, hat on, wrap pulled around me. A boat above a city of boats.

-
Tiny one-room concrete house, beside a busy freeway on the way to a wonder of the world. Aqua like houses in Patea. In the front garden a large grove of cake-tiered topiaries.

Wedding couple both in white on a blanket in a pine forest, wedding photos by the freeway.

In a town a mamma sits on a broken pavement next to her scooter, helmet on, large sleeping boy of 8 or 9 laid out on her lap, cuddled in.

Mamma in an ornate hat, standing behind daughter on daughter's bicycle, holding on, daughter is smiling.

Sister behind sister on a scooter, wrapping facemask around front-sister's ears.

And hand-ploughs. 

boat notes 23/12 -

Top deck of the boat, Ha Long Bay. Two lemon trees, the furled mast, red flag with yellow star and yellow flag. All the boats repainted white five months ago so they look 'international standard'. This silence is two or three low, even boat motors, and the water carrying on its whispered conversation with the narrowed base of every rock, each one cedes - 'do not cede upon your desire' wrote Lacan I think but where, why? we curl around the corner of an island, there's the sound of an anchor chain, it's just me up here, the shadow cuts away from the narrowed base to leave the island in relief against bright water. But everything here is dimly green, the smoggy, softly smoggy sky is yielding to the evening. Fisherman shouts a song, whistles across from his yellow house-station, our boat sounds a short, bright horn and it echoes around the rocks. Maybe it's not the fisherman who shouts but the Greeks in their bright yellow kayaks, spooning through the last of the light - not last, yet, but lowering. Lights are up on the mast of the Halong Dragon Cruise beside us and here on our deck by our lemon trees, which I know are not lemon trees - leaves are a little like verbena but in a seven-fingered hand. Maybe chilis. Not chilis. Wicker chairs, concrete slab table top.

A bat complains against the cliff and we're still moving. Kayaks go through a low hole in the rock, life jackets still just picking up light as they move out of the rock's shadows and off into imperceptibility, paddles catching just a little more, a final pinch... It's hard to believe no one else is up here, seeing this. G wrote 'H L B is beautiful, would give you time for quiet reflection.'

Now N is here, reclined on a wicker sun bed, pointing his camera at the sky, now Belle and Andy, friendly and independent at the far end of the deck. N's brought me an amaretto sour, the water's heavy and peaceful, soup, glossy molten iron picking up the boat lights, reflecting them in long smudged beams.

I love people here, I love the way we all want to see this wonder. In the cave - 'Surprising Cave' - the surprise is a stalacmite that looks like a cock, and it jumps out at you as you round a corner into this huge cavern, 200 metres across, with 800 metres of walkway snaking up one end and down the other. Looking down on the streams of people trooping along the walk - it's like the Inferno. But everyone's  exciteable, peaceful, capacious and grasping. Graffitti on the cave walls from 1956, 1938, 1905 - crass happy people, taking big bites of wonder and chewing it up, chewing themselves into it. A young fit Greek guy does a handstand at the peak of the walkway - a couple of hundred spectators to see him and laugh! Then our Vietnamese guide does one too, it's better, it's hilarious... I'm complaining in my head about the one boat generator I can hear near us but really I'm happy, happy to be an ugly human ape. N said to the guide, about monkeys  - 'really I think they are just bad people'. and H the guide said 'yes, and if you have a beautiful girlfriend, a monkey will like her too.'

Roof of the cave like the mud of a riverbed with the stones picked out, like paint rolled over a lino cut and sucked into soft peaks. The motor sound suddenly fading - they are moving away. Exciting promise of a different silence. The smell of deisely saline comes up, smell of Tryphena Harbour. Cone light on a cliff side. Another boat moves off. The cavern so huge that the stream of humans seemed in scale. Stalactite legs poking through the cave roof, dragon claws dangling down, the spine of a dragon pressing, dripping wax pillars, mysterious drapes.

So much detail, what for? Words for what I see and love? Can I describe it, and then what?