tuckova

Lana Turner Has Collapsed by Frank O'Hara

Lana Turner has collapsed! 
I was trotting along and suddenly
it started raining and snowing
and you said it was hailing
but hailing hits you on the head
hard so it was really snowing and
raining and I was in such a hurry
to meet you but the traffic
was acting exactly like the sky
and suddenly I see a headline 
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!
there is no snow in Hollywood
there is no rain in California
I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up

5ive, 2

How many V-neck or scoop-necked black T-shirts does Anne need?
a. One; it's a staple
b. One of each?
c. MORE! I NEED MORE!
-  From the cycle, "Conversations with myself while shopping to replace one lost thing and instead expanding my uniform"

 

How I can so enjoy the sensation of free-fall, carnival rides, that moment on the swingset hovering before swooping forward or back, and hate it in life. What it would take to embrace it and again feel the excitement of climbing the stairs, anticipation, and then falling, landing, getting up with a laugh and running around to do it again. 

 

Until I was, I think, in my late 20s I thought Joan Miro was a woman. I invented a sort of story about her hanging out with the surrealists and the Cubists, the way you fill in the details of a dream after you wake until it makes sense to you, I mean this was completely invented, her long cigarette holder, her paint-stained shirt, being treated as a peer while happily painting her clearly more feminine stars and swirls. Yeah. 

 

I am now at about 30% gray, meaning still 70% dishwater red. How do I feel about this? Is it time to stop dyeing (... and get busy living? shut up Andy) or do I hold out for 50% like I said I would. Curiosity vs sticking to intentions. Relatedly, a woman told me I looked really good for my age and I forgot to ask how old she thought I was, and this bothers me a great deal a week later. Good for fifty? or good for forty? 

 

This sentence: 
[Matisse was not callous.] It's just that he had only one answer to everything, which was to persist in art that could be justified solely by joy.
- from the New Yorker review of the Matisse Cut-Out show

baggage

I'm not letting go, because I'm sad about it and I think I will still feel spots of regret for a while yet. Things I haven't even realized I'm missing yet, that sudden pang of desire, the realization that one thing is gone, and the whole loss comes back in. It's not an ocean of sorrow; it's a pond, but for the moment I'm wallowing in it. The loss of art, of the language of love, of small treats I didn't need but wouldn't give myself. Tokens, mementos, silk and sand. 

I will eventually remember and then give up in turn on everything that I lost -- replace some with similar things; find new interesting distractions to fill the holes that are gaping with irretrievable losses. The first step is realizing you really have lost it; the second step is deciding what you need and getting it elsewhere; the third step is figuring out how to compensate for what cannot be replaced, and the fourth step so on and on. I will take step after step, because that is how you move on, and my life will smooth over and I will be able to remember everything I had without feeling particularly wrecked about the fact that I don't have any of it any more.

And I have said and will say again that in the scheme of things this loss is nothing much; trivial. My sadness is indulgent. The art of longing is performed against a backdrop rich with having; otherwise it is need, which this is not. I'm not stupid. I'm just a little sad; permit me this: a little sad, for one week longer. And then the gates close anyway, even on the hope I no longer hold.

But while I swear I will get over the loss, I equally promise that I won't forget the experience. I don't let go of that and I don't move on, because if I can't learn from it then it was for nothing. And the next time somebody says "let me hold that for you; trust me!" I will hesitate, hold what is precious to me to my chest for one minute longer before I think about releasing it, think a little harder about what the loss might mean. I'm not saying I won't trust them; I'm saying if I don't realize that it's a risk, I'm a fool. That's what I've learned. No matter how sweetly spoken, a promise to protect what I value doesn't mean what I thought it meant; it doesn't mean I can't lose it anyway. Because I have certainly lost this. 

The Active Reader (Bob Hicok)

       Reading a used book on evolution I wonder
about fingerprints, how long they live.
Were the fingers licked before the pages
were turned, did the owner
of the book, of the fingerprints
read in the bathroom, will there be a hair
on page 231, on a train, did he take the C
uptown, did she eat lunch with the pigeons
and hold the book open with her foot
as she sat cross-legged on the lawn
of the Municipal Building, a short hair,
curly and black or blond and straight
and long as my finger? Was she reading
instead of getting her license on the day
she'd promised to, after five months
of dreading the DMV, instead
of looking into the bill for lab tests,
one hundred and seventy seven dollars
to peek into her blood, her urine,
instead of calling the furnace guy
and dealing with his boots on the carpet,
with his mouth moving in front of hers,
with the expectation of small talk,
did the book keep her from visiting
her mother and asking about the MS,
did he hold the book between his face
and his wife, is it how he asked
for a divorce, by not speaking, by saying
the name Leaky over and over to himself,
by letting the pages stand in for his face?
Will I become everyone who read this book,
did their eyes change the letters,
is reading a sexual act, is there congress
between the text and my gaze,
is there no mirror left me but words,
why am I afraid of people, why do I talk
behind them to the edge of their shadows,
why did the continents drift, why didn't
the thumb stay put, is fear what it means
to be human, am I what it means to be human,
why did the brain ransom the heart
to the mouth, why did we ever come down
from the trees?

travel and other meanderings

Dear airports (and airlines), you dole out basic amenities like the Czechs used to dole out toilet paper. Small servings of a thing that I think you could easily include in your overhead costs and are making us pay for as a means of reminding us who is in control. A Czech acquaintance of mine wrote her thesis on gay lifestyle as recorded by one of the toilet guards, as public toilets were one of the places for gays to meet under Communism. Picture some middle-aged woman, tearing off individual squares and recording the various antics she saw in public bathrooms in the eighties; I expect she got more out of it than whatever is being collected while we sit in suspended animation buying four dollar water, ten dollar wine, trading our grandmother's maiden names for five minutes of connection to people we already like in an attempt to avoid conversation with people we won't.

Overheard, while waiting for the plane to Madrid:

Young man: So... are you going to Madrid, too?
Young woman: Yes.

YM: For vacation or...?

YW: I'm going to study there for a semester.

YM: Wow! So... you speak Italian?

 

Once while I was disembarking from a plane with young Squire a business suit came to me and said that he had never seen a finer job of parenting than me on a plane. It probably made my year, totally taking credit for what was in fact an incredibly easy kid to travel with. I regret that I was unable to say the exact same thing to the woman seated a row ahead of us yesterday. I was saving it for when we got off the plane, but when I turned she was gone. She was amazing. Not that the kid didn't cry, though he cried very little, but that the parent seemed to so completely enjoy him while not presuming that the rest of the plane shared her feelings and used her enjoyment of him as a means of entertaining him. Anyway, dear lady in 10C, thank you for making my flight better in more ways than one. 

 

Band names that didn't make the "stuff on our table" list of bands: The Plastic Knives. The Gravy Boats. The Sporks. 

Acknowledgement of but failure to actually go into the article about band names and which ones use definite articles and what that conveys, because I'm too jet-lagged to look into it. 

 

You guys, I am so tired. But happy to be home. Didja miss me?