Wow, Chris, what a list to read--who needs the books?

Do you happen to know Ian Buchanan at the U of Tasmania? (Maybe Maria of the
Snowy Hair does.) I'm going to tell him about _you_ so that he can die
happy, knowing there's someone else in the world who'd put Deleuze and
_Blade Runner_ on the same list.

Now, this part's for everybody: I think I stumbled on a great poem tonight
while wandering the Web, and I mean great as in Great. Go to
http://www.flashpointmag.com/kaufma~1.htm and read David Kaufman's "My
Father Fought in the Big One." Then come back and tell me I'm not dreaming.
Here's a couple of excerpts to get you jump-started:

The weather had nothing to do
With it, the heat nothing more
Than an excuse for me.
The Civil War got fought
As a function of our house,
A suburban Antietam
Between indians and knights.
A Roman in something like a gladitorial nude
Posed as a turn-on of pure action.
The Japanese
Yellow from gun to face
Dug in in their hundreds
In the ledges of my books. They're waiting
For the rules of engagement, now, they're
Waiting in the books
To go home.

Had they ever been quite well, none of it
Could have been: the ball
Set against the side-wall on the shady side
Of the house, an elm now obsolete because of
Disease. A garden replaced it.
A cat in the yard, a little decline
In the back. If you imagine it
As a photograph, you'll love it
As your own: bleached, blanched out
With the colors paradoxically brighter
As the lawn was green.
You had a garden in the sidelot, you grew
Corn on Staten Island. We had
Flowers, evergreens. I never cared
For plants as such,
But smells: real perfumes
From the drugstore made
Oranges beside the fact.
As for pine: it's
Pine, the index of pure
Retrospect.

****

Bugs offer the imperceptible
To sense, to all five senses, though
One or two at a time: a fly's wing
Battened to the mesh
Of a screen, the precision
Of wasps, the broad deployment
Of ants to the sink.
They write their primers
About the management
Of time. An ant
Has his lists of a single
Thing;
Remembers the way Vergil
Depicted bees
In the first Great Reich
Of the insect world.

****

To construct a poem
Out of arthropods, demands
A meaning for the thickening leaves.
The pollen
Brushes skin in a slight struggle
For air,
Aureoles
That can frame the sun
Into light. I'm still
Not sure what nature means
In the semantics of our present
Needs. I appear
As fallow
To be cast
As seed.

****

On a day as clear as today
Was (but you were in Vienna)
The men playing chess in
An ideal park see space
In the squares
Of abstraction. And their men--
And they're men--
Pirouette into movement
As horses return
From unrealizable fields.
They govern the diagonals in
Affordable strips, the cost,
An elaboration of acceptable loss.
The light makes the visible
Clear as thought, the lucent makes
A day in America. When the knight rides in
On a redcoat mare, the king
Is abashed at his harness. He cries
For shame, for shame, for shame.
He thinks about the freedom
Of the desolate word,
The scrip for snow
He forgets we forget.
This, my love, is a fable
Of check. And that a reduction
Of mate to the winds.



Well, I could give you more to go on with (it runs to 30 pages printed out),
but you'd better get going now--you don't want to keep a poem like this
waiting.

Candice