Why not?

Thought I'd swing by and announce to the world (or at least to the tumbleweeds and dust bunnies that inhabit this long-neglected blog) that Fanny's visa interview has been scheduled for January 18th, which means that we'll hopefully be heading for Texas (for good) in early February.

While I'm logged into blogger might as well post some of what I've been working on the past few months. A couple of poems:

WRITER'S BLOCK

He waits for his tongue
to ignite. Above his head
birds turn south again.
The television leaves nothing

unexplained. He distracts himself
with cheap beer, crushes
the empties against his forehead
like a linebacker

proving himself to the moon,
while the pumpjack
across the highway bobs
like a drinking bird,

and when it whistles
the dark, liquid bones
of prehistoric fish
swim up out of the ground.




SEATTLE SONG

Gray morning scowls through airport
windows and in the gaps between
buildings. The rain is never
not falling. Coffee breeds like a warm,
welcome disease. Harbor cranes
are enormous orange horses at the water.
Lichens sprout on wood roofs.
The coughing traffic comes down
with something. Five hundred feet in the air
tourists dine and rotate while the homeless
sleep in every bus depot like maniac
sports fans. A man in a football jersey
going to Alaska and gut fish. The drunk
beside him roadied for Marty Robbins
until the sumbitch stole his woman.
And my Jamaican cab driver hammers
the dashboard with a fist and fulminates
against the police. Even de cops
in Mis'sippi gib me less shit, man,
he says, turning to look me in the eye.
That's outrageous, I tell him.
That and this weather.

# posted by Daniel at 4:43 PM.

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Poem

Hot off the presses. Any bits where it's unclear or incoherent? And I'm still not sure about the ending; can't decide if it's too glowingly sentimental. Your opinions on all these questions are actively solicited.



MESQUITO

Though mesquite meaning the tree and mosquito
meaning the insect with an oil derrick for a nose
come out unrelated in the spelling, at least
in Abilene when we said them they matched,
sanded down to rough equivalence
by dialect: mesquito for the bug, little tree,
like abuelito for little abuelo, dear
grandfather in the Spanish overheard in kitchens
and convenience stores. Mesquito, tiny
buzzing mesquite, cursed and slapped
like the crooked, water-sucking trees that ranchers
swatted off their land with backhoes, a bite
like the three inch thorns I learned to avoid
when climbing the gnarled granddaddy
that hunched and creaked beside our trailer
as if forever climbing out of bed. Mesquito,
drag racing the circuit of the ears, whine
and whisper like wind through feathered leaves
in the highest branches. Mesquito, swarms
at dusk chasing us inside, air full of ruckus
and a softening light that graveled the driveway
with the thin shadows of trees growing
darker, darker, as the lights came on inside.

# posted by Daniel at 3:16 PM.

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Recent books

My apologies to the ten or so of you who stop by here every day. As you probably know I haven't been that interested in the blog lately. Don't worry; I'm not going to do anything rash like deleting it, but posts won't likely become less scarce in the forseeable future.

I do want to take the time to recommend a couple of books. The first is called Organic Housekeeping, by Ellen Sandbeck, and is exactly what the title indicates: how to keep your home clean and sanitary without the use of chemicals. She discusses all the different ways that chemicals and housekeeping practices can make your home toxic and then explains how to do it right. Interestingly enough, whereas going organic with food means spending more, organic housekeeping means spending a good deal less: virtually all cleaning tasks can be taken care of with baking soda, white vinegar, and hydrogen peroxide. And you won't be drenching your house in the known carcinogens that make up most household cleaning products.

One hint: skip the first chapter. It's all about organizing, and isn't nearly as funny, useful, or engaging as the rest of the book.

The other book is The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan. We've read a fair bit of his in the last year; I'm working on A Place of My own and Fanny has read both that and Second Nature. Dilemma is on a level of it's own, though. Subtitled "A Natural History of Four Meals," the book is an (successful) effort to figure out exactly what we eat. The first meal is a cheeseburger and fries from McDonald's, which leads to an investigation of corn and the modern food industry (corn, as it turns out, is the main ingredient in the majority of the food we eat). He goes to factory farms, to slaughter-houses, discusses the history and evolution of the corn plant. The second meal comes from Whole Foods, and the related discussion does a good job of robbing Big Organic of much of its luster (although it is still arguably a better and more healthy alternative to the mainstream food industry). He also spends time on a sustainable family farm in Virginia, which gives him his third meal (and a intruiging glimpse into other ways that we might feed ourselves). Finally, he hunts and forages a meal in the forest, which provides a nice end to the book and some interesting reflections on the relationship between culture and food.

This is a book that cannot be read without a serious re-examination of the way one eats. It did not, however, strike me as particularly polemic or slanted--this is simply a journalistic inquiry into what exactly we eat. If the answers to that question are disturbing or offensive--well, all the more reason to ask the question.

(P.S. Michael Pollan is also an extremely readable stylist. Even if I had completely rejected the book's findings I would have enjoyed the reading of it. So go to the library already.)

# posted by Daniel at 12:29 PM.

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Poem

SPAGHETTI WESTERN

No frying tomatoes stain the air with their fragrance.
She's gone. The apartment door swings open.
His backfiring Vespa parked against the curb below.
He learned Italian to make conversation with her mother
and she's gone. Every scrap of furniture too.
He lights a cigarette, imagines her dark haired cousins
carrying everything down the stairs for her, probably
singing some vulgar medieval folk song where a woman
leaves her dumb foreign husband. His dog's dead too,
curled like a closed parenthesis on the living room carpet.
The hot sun bleeds on the rooftops. Water glitters
like a fever in the bay. He throws his cigarette away
into the street. Cobblestones older than the great-grandfather
of the man who founded the town in Kansas where he was born.
Nothing left in the apartment but sunlight. Scattered
newspapers, broken pasta in the bottom of a drawer.
A tinny radio in the bedroom playing punk rock
in a local dialect he can't quite catch. Two weeks later
when he tracks her down in Salerno she'll swear
the dog was alive, howling as she left and he'll believe her.
But now he curses her in both their languages, lights
another cigarette. The DJ introduces musica americana
and plays Hank Williams. So lonesome he could cry.

# posted by Daniel at 2:40 PM.

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Green houses and other diversions

Lately (as in the last two weeks) I've been devouring a series of books on various green/low-energy home construction techniques. This covers a lot of ground--everything from passive solar design to composting toilets to rainwater catchment systems. Fanny and I intend eventually to build our own house, and right now my lack of job or educational responsibilities allows me the freedom to learn as much about this as possible. The ideal home would be a zero-energy house--it provides for its own energy, water, waste disposal, and climate control. Lots of fascinating stuff--probably too geeky and detailed for me to talk much about on this blog, but if anyone is interested in these sorts of things don't hesitate to chat me up next time we talk. The goal is to learn enough through research and workshops to be able to do as much of the actual construction ourselves as possible. And I'll make a standing offer now that when the time comes anyone who shows up to lift straw bales or dig holes will be treated to burgers and beer (Boca and wheatgrass for more enlightened readers).

In other news, we're slogging through the visa process for Fanny. Right now the first stage of the application is off at the Dept. of Homeland Security. We're hoping to have it back in the next couple of weeks so we can submit the second half of the required paperwork.

I've also been turning my poems "Speed" and "Rainboy" into kids' stories, as well as getting the Seamonster story back on track and coordinated with Carrie, who is doing the illustrations. These all seem to be coming along nicely.

Not a whole lot of poetry of late, but lots of other productive activity. And tomorrow I turn 27, which is a good age. Divisible by three and all. If you want to send me something send money to a charity instead. I recommend Canadian Food for the Hungry.

# posted by Daniel at 3:18 PM.

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Dead Man Plug

Roger Jones over at PoBiz has some nice things to say about my chapbook. Dr. Jones was one of my Creative Writing profs at Texas State and the faculty advisor on Persona, the student literary journal I worked on for a couple of years. Most of what I know about the formal craft of writing I picked up in his classes, so it's heartening to get his professorial thumbs up.

# posted by Daniel at 3:16 PM.

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Poem

LAWNMOWER MAN

Halfway through the back yard there's a growl
and kachunk. The whirling grass-wet blade
snarls out the back of the mower like a trained dog
off its chain and chews through his ankles. He crawls
bug eyed with panic through the half-finished manicure
of his lawn. The back porch looms like a sea-cliff.
Cut grass sticks to his face. Even as he swims
his scrabbling hands tell him how the lawn's begun
to grow again. He'll swear he heard it laughing.

(4/30/06)

# posted by Daniel at 12:20 AM.

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