Interval

An elderly gent is poking in his closet, looking for a beloved pair of brown oxfords. He pokes and he pokes and then it dawns on him. He took them to a shoemaker to resole twenty-nine years go but forgot to pick them up. But he remembers the name of the shoemaker and, lo, there's the address in the book. So he drives over, steps in, and, yes, he even remembers the shoemaker, though he's older now.

"Look," the guy says, "you're going to think I'm crazy, but after twenty-nine years I just remembered, I brought a pair of brown oxfords here twenty-nine years ago to be resoled, and then forgot to pick them up. I don't suppose there's any chance that you have them?"

Without batting an eye the shoemaker goes to the back room, and he's gone a long time. But then he comes back and tells the guy, "Sure, I still got 'em." The guy's so tickled he can hardly contain himself. What glorious karma, for them to be still there. "Great," he says, "can I have them?" The shoemaker thinks for a moment. then, "Sure you can have 'em. They'll be ready Thursday afternoon."

Something Borrowed

Yesterday afternoon, as I was walking up steep School Street Hill, a likely lad was plunging down on his bike, his hands dancing high over his head. Me oh my, as a whiff of his energy coursed through me!

Sauce

Today I'm thinking of last night's lamb stew. The key is rosemary and white wine, but lacking wine I used saki instead. Flour the lamb and brown it. Sauté abundant onions and carrots. How much flour you allow into the sauté determines thinness or thickness. Some add tomatoes and tomato paste. No time. I stick to the way the French make it, though I also put potatoes in. Balance the veggies strongly against the meat. Help the lamb forgive you.

Today spaghetti sauce with sausage. With plenty of oregano and capers. Black olives if I have them. Red wine, which I do have. Sauté onions and carrots. Brown sausage meat out of the skin. Canned tomatoes, tomato sauce. I haven't cut an onion yet, or browned a sausage, but I smell the sauce.

Today, poetry sauce is Sir Walter Ralegh's translation of Aeneid, vi,724-7, in Raleigh's History of the world:

The heauen, the earth, and all the liquid mayne,
The Moones bright Globe, and Starres Titanian,
A spirit which through each part infus'd doth passe.
Fashions, and workes, and wholly doth transpierce
All this great body of the Vniuerse.

China

In 1984-85 my family and I lived on the campus of Peking University, where I was teaching. During that year I regularly visited a 97-year-old American who had been in China continually since 12923, a year after the Chinese Communist Party was formed. Fascinated with the stories he told me, some of them coherent, some not, I launched a research project that continued after I returned to the States and through a second visit to China to attend his 100th birthday celebration, followed in tend days by his death. Winter's story is that of a sensitive and keen participant observer who puts his listener/reader in touch with both the nuances of Chinese social life and also the violence of China's modern history.

Now, through a series of karmic coincidences, I am excited to be working with the manuscript again.

Day after Thanksgiving

At the dinner table last night at my daughter's home, with a wildly diverse bunch of people, including a macho sheriff, I ate what maybe the biggest meal in my life. A heaping plate and then a second heaping plate. That's not usual for me. I'd fasted the day before and maybe that explains it. But I've gotta admit that the second plateful was as good as the first.

Two of my three children were the red. So good simply to enjoy them. And my grandson, now almost eleven, who holds a very big warm place in my life. How could I not be thankful, basking in the warmth of a peaceful family.

How about this -- opening poem in Jerry Rothenberg's Cincealments & Caprichos

THE SLEEP OF REASON

for Clayton Eshelman


Words imprinted on a sign
by Goya glowing
white against a surface
nearly white:
"the sleep of reason
that produces monsters."
He is sitting on a chair
his head slumped
resting on his arms
or on the marble table,
pencil set aside,
his night coat open
thighs exposed.
All things that fly at night
fly past him.Wings that brush an ear,
an ear concealed,
a memory beginning
in the house of sleep.
His is a world where owls
live in palm trees,
where a shadow in the sky
is like a magpie,
white & black are colors
only in the mind,
the cat you didn't murder
springs to life,
a whistle whirling in a cup,
gone & foregone,
a chasm bright with eyes.
There is a cave in Spain,
a feral underworld,
where bats are swarming
among bulls,
the blackness ending in a wall
his hands rub up against, a blind man in a painted world,
amok and monstrous
banging on a rock.

Nuthin' Much

Nobody's asking me for a diary, but I'm enjoying this. Yesterday, in conversation with a friend at the Rockefeller Archives, a project I'd put aside some twenty years ago leaped back into life, and I had a chance to reflect on the odd twists of kharma. I say "reflect," but that suggests an insight, something profound. No, just the same old same old: things come and go, and once in the while some unhatched egg stirs and there's the chipping beak and then the peep peep. Now I can only wait to see if a chicken is to follow.

Now that I'm beginning to grow up at the age of 80, I find that I have a gift of gratitude that often enough shapes my days. No point listing all that I have to be grateful for including family, which I didn't properly value in the past. And also the grace of awakening each morning with the feeling that I can help make the day interesting and loving.

a herring

I promised jokes. Here's a joke I think of as hermetic, because only old school Jews get it.

Two old friends, out of the same shtetl, met a couple of times a week for tea in Manhattan, always the same time, same place. Sp they're sitting there, as they always did, staring into their tea cups because everything they had to talk about they'd already talked about. Finally, one of them looks up, still a little dreamy from the tea steam but rising on the wings of an idea. "Okay, Shimel" he says, "wot's green and you hang it on the vall and it vistles."

Shimel is still mostly in his tea cup, but slowly he raises his head, half dazed, half quzzical, and says, "Green, you hang it on the vall and it vistles? How should I know because there's no such thing. C'mon, you tell me." So Chaim, the first man, replies, "A herring." Shimel's astonished. ""A herring?! A herring is green?" Chaim says, so you pain it green." "Okay, okay, a herring, a herring hangs on the vall?" Chaim, simply, "So you hang it on the vall?" Now Shimel is getting exasperated. "So now you gung tell me a herring vistles?!" Chaim lets the moment hang, then, "So it doesn't visel."

Stone Soup

Last week I read at the Out of the Blue Gallery in the Stone Soup series. Jack Powers was very much present, though he died more than a month ago. He continues to be a good presiding spirit, as does Chad Parentau, who has been running the series for five years. For me, the evening had a couple of highlights. On the open mike John Stern perfectly recited poems ranging from Emma Lazarus through Shakespeare to Robert W. Service -- all paramount recitations, the spirit of the words perfectly embodied in John's voice and gestures that changed from poem to poem. To hear John's Lazrus is like hearing the Statue of Liberty speaking. Also at the open Mike was the inimical Billy Barnum. Toothless, spastic, dressed in a witch's brew of exotic clothes and drapery, Billy recited an allegorical poem of his in which a male erotic figure visits a female loneliness. The language, as it usually is with Billy, was inspired, and his body movements were hypnotizing grace. Out of the Blue, host of three series that I know, can sometimes feel like the wild west, but it can also be the scene of astonishing performances.

Last night, with a class of men on probation out of Dorchester District Court, I took part in a remarkable discussion of the Tolstoy story, "Korney Vasielevitch." The story is about a rich man hungry for more, who, returning from a business trip, finds that his wife has been cheating on him. Under real provocation by her taunts, he falls into a rage, beats her savagely, and also permanently cripples the arm of their young daughter when she stands between him and his wife. Korney leaves the house the next morning and for seventeen years wanders deeper and deeper into denigration. At the end of that time, a drunken tram still driven by rage against his wife, he returns home. What follows is a drama of forgiveness that contains a range of moral subtleties not easily resolved.

The men were magnificent, not only interpreting and asking just the right questions, but also seeing the analogies to their own lives. One of the subjects that came up is whether everyone has a core of goodness, no matter how veiled. For eight weeks, through the course, the men have been rediscovering their own goodness, and it was a remarkable occasion to feel how much that discovery was in the air.

itting Bottom

Last night, with a class of men on probation out of Dorchester District Court, I took part in a remarkable discussion story, "Korney Vasielevitch." The story is about a rich man hungry for more, who, returning from a business trip, finds that his wife has been cheating on him. Under real provocation by her taunts, he falls into a rage, beats her savagely, and also permanently cripples the arm of their young daughter when she stands between him and his wife. Korney leaves the house the next morning and for seventeen years wanders deeper and deeper into denigration. At the end of that time, a drunken tram still driven by rage against his wife, he returns home. What follows is a drama of forgiveness that contains a range of moral subtleties not easily resolved.

The men were magnificent, not only interpreting and asking just the right questions, but also seeing the analogies to their own lives. One of the subjects that came up is whether everyone has a core of goodness, no matter how veiled. For eight weeks, through the course, the men have been rediscovering their own goodness, and it was a remarkable occasion to feel how much that discovery was in the air.

For five years Tam Lin Neville have edited Off the Grid Press. We've published five books, two of which have won significant prizes, and all of which have received national attention. Now we are in the process of becoming a non-profit company, and we are now raising money to launch our first contest. We plan to publish two books a year by poets over sixty.

This move allows us to enter the mainstream of poetry presses, and, with the help of a strong board whose members are Lee Sharkey, Gwen Swenson, Roger Mitchell, Alex Neville, and Kevin McCrea, we anticipate a lively future.