bookofdays

notes from their front line

I know I said I’d blog from California, but the trip proved unexpectedly tiring: physical challenges to  my vertigo presented by hills and wobbly public transit, the usual business-trip logistics, and intermittent Internet access in the various homestays. But most of all, my brain was full to bursting with stories -- from experts like Judy Ehrlich (link to TGW) and the directors of the Military Law Task Force of the National Lawyers’  Guild, but more important, from veterans of America’s three most recent wars.

I talked to Vietnam veterans like Paul Cox, who “turned off the war,” he says, when his unit slaughtered mamas and babies in their huts; Mike Wong, who left after advanced training rather than go to Vietnam;  and Steve Morse, a born Quaker who went back in after  his court martial for insubordination, and followed the invasion of Cambodia. I talked to Gulf War veteran Daniel Fahey, who went on to become a leading voice for those exposed to depleted uranium. I talked to Stephen Funk, the first public conscientious objector of the Iraq war, whose unusual and lefty background and sweet, fey presence make him an unusual military voice – but who still says “it’s easier to talk to people who’ve been through the training.”

And to two funding members of Iraq Veterans Against the War – one of whom’s still in the National Guard, and another who was a member of the First Marine Expeditionary Force – yes, that one.

glimpses from fog

Well, last Friday was George Freeman, doing his gangstalawyah imitation on us all. This week, it was Richard Holbrooke, who at the State Department and the U.N. had the closest thing to a real conscience of any of them.

But I have my usual change-of-seasons cold, and even looking at my cursory notes doesn't make me think any more clearly.  I'll therefore perhaps write about him  later. Tonight I'll punt to my  betters on all things, and end with a quote from one of my avatars, Frederic Tuten.

The links first:

• Laura Rozen's trip down memory lane, in which she reminds us of a young, passionate Republican congressman named Richard Cheney, determined to  get to the bottom of Iran-contra.
• Firedoglake: as always, your source for intelligent analysis of today's indictments and what they mean for future investigation of WHIG-gate.
• Body and Soul, even while she writes her book about torture, is keepin' one eye on how NOLA is the new neocon playpen. After all, their hit  Baghdad Year Zero. was such a raging success.

And now for something completely different: a celebration of fiction - the hardest, most experimental fiction out there, too. Frederic wrote this for Fence Magazine, so if you want to read the whole thing, pick one up. (And while you're picking up magazines, if you're interested in seeing a story of mine called "Snow Angels," consider buying a copy of the new, struggling Me Three.)

Think of yourself as making art -- however bombastic or vague that may sound even to you--and not as a producer of products or units:  You will thus relieve yourself of worrying about your work's social or political function, since zll art is redemptive, salvational, ennobling and is a protest against ignorance, crime, lies and Death....One beautiful novel shames all broad enterprises and sends brightness through the prison walls of prisons, parliaments, and publishing houses.

(And if  you're worried about the implications of the word "salvational," click on the Fence link and giggle.)

2000

Uh-huh.

As we observe that number, remember also the tenfold more dead civilians.

Some links that fit these reflections:

• I'm late on this, but Maureen Dowd rules in her Miller piece.  Anyone who starts referencing Thackeray, on her  way to slicing Judith Miller to ribbons, demonstrates true class. Read it via Steve Gilliard, if only for the photo.
• It's not enough that they're stressed and getting shot at: now they get to lose it all at the table.
• Eric Schmitt gives the most concise expression to what we're all thinking when Bush/Rice start talking new war: With who?
• Via the Rage Diaries: Data bad! Data confuse government!
• Debra Dickerson's review in Salon of Kayla Williams' book contains this concise, extraordinary passage:

The military is full of diamond-in-the-rough kids like her who might have made a few mistakes but still know that there are uncharted worlds inside them. They know they were destined for a polyester uniform; making a break for the GI's outfit, rather than the burger flipper's -- or, God forbid, the inmate's -- is a daring demand to be taken seriously, to be invested in, to be challenged. To be seen. For poor or lost kids, joining up is an escape attempt, a prison break. Our all-volunteer military remains tenable only because these strivers somehow know that hot marches in the sun and nights spent sleeping in a foxhole will open the door to whatever's buried inside their dreams.

Now that it's Tuesday, I'll wrap up with what's frosted me since Friday  morning -- when I saw George Freeman, a lawyer for the New York Times, on Friday, try  to make Judith Miller's case an integral part of  a lecture on the legal concept of reporter's privilege.the pixie dust Freeman tried to toss in our eyes.

He allowed that Miller's work did not present the best argument for a shield law. "Would I have wanted a different set of facts in this case?" he said, spreading his arms wide. " Of course."

As part of the wider discussion, about how the concept of reporter's privilege involved, we of course discussed the issue of the inclusion of bloggers; having just written the post that appears below, I quoted it to him and suggested blogs were also a "weapon in the defense of liberty." He responded like  lawyer/politician: you'd never get the Senate to support that, he said.

Then Freeman proceeded to give a perfect, party-line defense of Miller. He said that Lewis Libby's original waiver, whose signing was mandatory as a condition of the White House, couldn't  be believed as sincere until the two of them talked -- and that recent events, including the negotiations that led to her release. were a sign that Fitzgerald was becoming "pretty desperate."

He stuck by Miller's story that she had "discovered" her June 2003 notebook just recently; a friend said later that she'd not been able to ask him about reports (by Murray Waas,  and now others) others that Miller only admitted that meeting existed after seeing Secret Service logs that proved she was there.

His politics came clear, and predictable enough, from his opinion of the leak case itself, which mimicked Richard Cohen's = not much of a crime, so he's going to create a conspiracy about a non-crime.  I so wanted to ask him about the Daily News' confirmation of Miller's  "charter membership" in the White House Iraq Group, but I'd used up my question time talking about free speech for blogs.

Now I join the rest of you in waiting to hear how many of the  powerful men, the suns to which Miller's flower turned, are placed under indictment - or whether the administration will decide to raise the flag of secrecy over the whole thing.

and they see only their own shadows

The liberty of the press is not confined to newspapers and periodicals. It necessarily embraces pamphlets and leaflets. These indeed have been historic weapons in the defense of liberty, as the pamphlets of Thomas Paine and others in our own history abundantly attest. The press in its connotation comprehends every sort of publication which affords a vehicle of information and opinion.
        -- Justice Charles Evans Hayes, Lovell v. Griffin, 1934

In the height of the Great Depression, someone had an idea about whether  bloggers should be considered journalists. Not that Justice Hayes, born in 1882, would ever have conceived of the Web, let alone a Web log, as he considered whether the First Amendment applied to broadsheets put out in the city of Lovell, California.

I've been watching elite journalists muse soulfully on the question, "Are bloggers journalists?" for what feels like a sickeningly long time, but is probably only since this past February, when the National Press Club convened its first panel on the question in the aftermath of the Jeff Gannon scandal.

John Aravosis, had investigated a fellow named James Guckert, who had been allowed into the White House press corps under the name Jeff Gannon. Aravosis found out, among other things, that Gannon had advertised his services as a male prostitute online and that his news service, Talon News, was funded directly by the Republican Party (rather like those 18th-century news broadsheets Andie Tucher spoke of in that August lecture).

So with worried faces, a panel that included Gannon,  Congress Daily's John Stanton, former Philadelphia Inquirer staffer Ana-Marie Cox, now running an online column, mused soulfully on whether people like Gannon, or even like Cox, should be taken seriously, or seriously marginalized. (Aravosis, whose work exposing Gannon was the kind of digging Sree likes to talk about, wasn't invited onto the panel, though he spoke from the audience.)

The well-paid journalists in the room were worried, perhaps justly, about this blending of fact and opinion, which depending on who you read (just as with print magazines) can be crude or well crafted, thoughtful or not, original or lazy. These conversations seemed, at that point, kind of theoretical.

Not any more, in the wake of a journalism scandal far more explosive than Jeff Gannon and the resulting talk of a federal shield law, including testimony before Congress on the part of the very journalist who's at the center of the scandal. And the Press Club was at it again, on the same day as some of its  members were asking: do bloggers deserve this shield?  And the panel, this time including  Jane Kirtley, a professor of media ethics at the University of Minnesota, and two TV journalists, agreed "probably not." All of it part of "National Free Speech Week, which may define irony, as noted by Roxanne .

Suddenly we're wondering what sort of writer gets First Amendment protection, and of what kind. And that brings me - briefly, I promise - back to the Supreme Court.

the cup of despair goes on the shelf

What  is Needed After Food

And so beautiful it cracks the bones, especially Jerusalem
With the lustre of her stones, the hurt in her eyes
And our dreams for her children:  a triangle

Beauty, despair, hope...the whole mispocah
Pulling three ways at the same time
Like the people in so many families,

Fighting but joined at the hip, or call it a sandwich,
Despair the filling embraced by the bread of beauty and hope,
Like manna we at every day, sent from above,

While on earth in Jerusalem my friend's husband and son
Relax  from a sabbath meal, like well-fed beasts,
Happily slumped watching the aftermath

Of a game where the Nazareth team has just won
And vaulted from the bottom of their  league
To the top, the players have stripped off their shirts,

Hugging and dancing, circle dancing, belly dancing,
Waving at crowds in the stands to  make them cheer louder,
The coach strips his shirt from his hairy barrel chest,

Climbs a wire fence, wobbles and waves his hips.
When someone asks how he feels about his team
(A mix of Jews, Moslems, and one Nigerian,

He himself is Druze), he punches  the air
And roars, I beat them all! I beat Arafat! And Sharon!
I show them we love each other! We watch a while,

The celebration is still going on when we quit
To go back to the kitchen, where loaves of beauty and hope
Stand on the counter and the cup of despair goes on the shelf,

My friend and I, we don't ask for much, we read Amichai,
We're not messianic, we don't expect utopia, which is anyway
Another name for a smiling prison,

But love is a good idea, why on earth not,
Simple women that we are, simple mothers cleaning up
The kitchen to make one meal ready for the next.

                    -- Alicia Suskin Ostriker

When I started this blog, I said I'd post a poem on any day I couldn't write. I'd fallen away from it, which I now think is an error.   Alicia Suskin Ostriker's name may be familiar to you for her activism on peace and justice issues, but I've admired and taught her poetry for years now, and  was delighted to be able to review her new book for Pleiades. I'll post my thoughts, as I draft the review, in a bit - but for now, let this one be my offering to the morning, amid all our strife and horror.

 

in the presence of a doctor

  The Romans never used torture except on slaves, but then slaves were not regarded as men. Nor does it appear that a judge in the criminal court regards as a fellow human being a man whom they bring to him haggard, pale, defeated, eyes downcast, his beard long and dirty, covered with the vermin that  gnawed at him in his cell. He gives himself the pleasure of applying the great and the little torture, in the presence of a doctor who takes his pulse, up to the point where he could be in danger of death, after which they start again; as they say, "It helps to pass an hour or two."
    The grave  magistrate has bought, for a certain amount of money, the right to carry out these experiments on his fellow-man, will tell his wife at dinner what happened that morning. The first time Madame was revolted; the second, she acquired a taste for it, for after all women are curious; and then the first thing she says to him when he comes home in his judicial robes is, "My little heart, haven't you had the question applied to anyone today?"

  I feel like we are all turning into Madame Magistrate. Except that instead of judges, those asking that question are military psychologists.

As I mentioned in comments to Jeanne, who beat me to first mention of what's below, I feel like I should have seen this coming long ago.

The reports from U.S. detentions centers, from Abu Ghraib to Bagram to Guantanamo, have from the beginning echoed the excesses inside U.S. military training bases - a drill sergeant near-lethally kicking a trainee at Fort Benning or Knox, the horrific 1993 battery and sexual humiliation of Air Force Academy cadet Elizabeth Saum, or the reports of cigarette burns to the genitalia of Marine trainees undergoing SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) training at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. As someone familiar with these reports, I felt like an idiot when a SERE graduate, commenting on Juan Cole's site a few weeks back about abuse of the Koran, noticed how much the setup at Gitmo echoed what he experienced at Bragg.

Had I the resources and time, I'd have done what Jane Mayer has done, and chased down the actual,  logistical connection between the two. In "The Experiment," in this week's New Yorker (not online yet),  she confirms that the SERE training, used to help GI's resist what Joseph Lelyveld calls " coercive interrogation" should they be captured., is now being turned inside out -- with psychologists, as confirmed separately elsewhere, assisting interrogators:

but I can't spell the word surprize

We were definitrely overdue for a blog thing -- rhis one courtesy of the BBC! Thanks to Liz, who is far cooler than I, though her resuts showed her as a fellow word geek. Proof: she's spending the summer in my other home town, San Francisco. Go take the quiz and let me know how it came out?

You are a Linguistic Thinker
		Linguistic thinkers: Tend to think in words, and like to use language to express complex ideas. Are sensitive to the sounds and rhythms of words as well as their meanings.
Like linguistic thinkers, Leonardo made meticulous descriptions in his journals. He also made an effort to learn Latin - a foreign language		Other Linguistic Thinkers include William Shakespeare, Sylvia Plath, Anne Frank Careers which suit Linguistic thinkers include Journalist, Librarian, Salesperson, Proof-reader, Translator, Poet, Lyricist

How would other people score?  Can you imagine friends or family members who might think differently to you?

joe pulitzer's wonderfully disreputable ghost

The Post follows current American news industry practice of killing any story based on evidence from a confidential source if a government honcho privately denies it. A flat-out "we didn't do it" is enough to kill an investigation in its cradle.

With that succinct statement, Greg Palast has punctured the illusions of many a young journalist.

Like everyone, I've  followed this weekend's revelations about "Deep Throat" with interest; I was too young to understand much of the Watergate hearings over the thundering of my Republican father, but at twelve I was pulled into the cinematic version  (the first time I wanted to be a newspaper reporter, actually -- something I always forget, given my circuitous route since) and intrigued enough by the Holbrook shadow-figure offering clues for the cub reporters to follow. The story of the 91-year old Mark Felt, whose motivations were not the purest on the planet when he formed his  bizarre partnership with Bob Woodward, trying to sell his story to Vanity Fair felt at first mostly significant for its pathos, till the right-wing offensive (thank GOD I don't have cable) reminded us of the true relevance of this story. "Treasonous," they cried, usefully echoing Rumsfeld, Shrub and Myers as they smeared Amnesty International for using the word I've done all along about the torture bases -- "gulag."

Deep Throat came out for money, but his emergence reminds us of what journalists used to do in pursuit of the truth -- and what even mainstream newspapers like the Washington Post were willing to support, in order to comfort the afflicted and afflict the powerful. Naive as I am, I'd assumed that the sloth and timidity of recent years a mix of greed and inertia. I feel like a moron to learn that skepticism of the statements of the powerful is no longer central to the profession -- it's a hazard.

George McGovern, for whom I cast my first happy (if futile) vote in 1984, yearns for a new Deep Throat to save us:

"We need someone like that who is highly placed to tell us what's really going on. We know that we were misled on Iraq," McGovern told Fox News Radio.

McGovern, a former senator, unsuccessfully ran against Richard Nixon for the White House in 1972.

Deep Throat, revealed this week as former

FBI assistant director Mark Felt, acted as a source to The Washington Post newspaper, helping to bring down Nixon's presidency over the Watergate scandal in 1974.

"I wish there were somebody of the Deep Throat time in this administration who are aware of what's going on," McGovern told Fox News Radio.

"This war in Iraq, in my opinion is worse than anything Nixon did. I think Nixon deserved to be expelled from office in view of the cover-up that he carried on and the laws that he violated."

McGovern, apparently, is as unaware as I was of the shift in newsroom policies, from spunk to fear. No wonder the Downing Street Memo has barely made a splash so far; why talk of impeachment has so far raised only by the usual suspects. You can impeach a guy for sex, but not for spilling the blood of hundreds of thoussnds. If the NY Times, which is reported to be working on a story, punts (just like Woodward's new Washington Post did with Palast's evidence about the 2000 elections, we may all as well become Jeff  Gsnnon and find more direct means to fellate the White House.

Why did I name this post after Joe Pulitzer? Because, as I learned nearly 2 months ago from Columbia Journalism Review editor Andie Tucher, it took 10 years before Columbia University would accept his gift of $2 million, offered in 1892, for a journalism school -- on the grounds that such an nasty, disreputable profession would sully an institution of higher learning. I guess it's time, again, to live up to that.

Time for nasty hands, for climbing gutters to beg a source to help us, for not taking a White House denial as anything but a reason to push harder and get the story out. Nowadays, of course, such an approach is downright dangerous, and can land you in prison, broke, dead (cf. Gary Webb) or stuck in tinfoil-hat territory.  But no other way has any honesty. In this case, nasty hands are clean hands.

-----

I am such a bad member of the Progressive Blogger Union. The hard-working chair sends out a loose topic every week and sometimes I follow it, or manage to connect it to what I was going to write already.  Other times I can't switch my obsessions that fast, as passionate as I may potentially be about global warming or the Minutemen (that I could write about now, of course, after the spotlight has passed). But this week's themes are just up my alley, and so I put forward the first half of my contribution to PBU23 -- with a promise of more to come tomorrow night. Then, I'll make more direct reference to the way newspapers and TV news mis-report the war every day (for now, looksee what Jorgey at MediaInTrouble has called out).

crip journo manifesto

How I Will Change the Face of Disability on the Planet
(for the Ethel Louise Armstrong Foundation)

You already are,’ a friend told me when I told her about the required title of this essay. She meant the writing I’ve done for magazines like New Mobility  and Inside MS,  as well as my work on “The Largest Minority,” a show on WBAI Radio here in New York City. She was also referring to what has driven both of the above: my twenty years of living with multiple sclerosis, a chronic degenerative disease of the nervous system that has at different times left me too dizzy to hold my head up, stammering, unable to walk, or crying in pain with tonic seizures -- each of which episodes has its echoes now in my daily life (intermittent stammer and vertigo, impaired gait). 

But what you want to know, I think, is what I will do with all of the above.  How can a writer, a journalist and storyteller, have a concrete impact on the lives of people with disabilities?

When people ask my journalistic specialties, I have tended to answer that I have three main ones: human rights, military issues, and “the intersection of fitness and disability.”  While the market demands this kind of niche thinking, I’m hoping to break down as many of those barriers as possible – and thus to help shatter the concept that there are people with  disabilities, and then there are “normal people.” As American society ages, awareness is just beginning to grow that most people will eventually join the ranks of the “physically challenged.”  Certainly every phone call from the cousin who’s just started a round of chemotherapy, the mother of a son who just came back from Iraq with a constant ringing in his ears, the grandmother who needs a ride to the grocery store should remind those who consider themselves “not disabled” that our relationship to our own health can alter our lives permanently. But they’re more likely to mutter those immortal words, there but for the grace of God go I. And so far, too few connect those experiences “the disabled.” Those of us who, for whatever reason, have had to grapple with a heavier deck of cards from the beginning aren’t “the disabled,” or “people with disabilities,” or whatever formulation you prefer. What writers can do is make that fact real – so that we’re neither abstract conversations about justice or medical efficacy or perky little “inspirational” stories on the 11 o’clock news just before the weather.

I’ve already been privileged to tell stories of people who’ve refused to accept the categories handed them by doctors, whether it was Jimmie Heuga, former Olympic skier who ignored doctors’ advice, after his diagnosis with MS in 1972, not to exercise, eventually founding a center that helps people with MS integrate exercise into their lives; Barry Wallenstein, a poet and college professor who kept his MS diagnosis under the radar for years while maintaining a full class load and an active performance schedule; competitive swimmer Cheryl Angelleli, whose SCI from a 1983 diving board accident kept  her out of the pool for 14 years, until aquatherapy reminded her what she’d missed (I had  the privilege of interviewing her for New Mobility Magazine before she medaled in the 2004 Paralympics); and Cynthia Nichols, an HIV-positive former drug addict who’s become a certified substance abuse counselor and coordinator of support groups for women with HIV.

Each time, as much as word count allows, I’ve worked to paint a full picture of their lives: Heuga sharing frustrations as well as accomplishments, Angelleli confiding she was about to be married, Wallenstein joking about his wild 1960s lifestyle and the joys of his grown children leaving the nest. And Cynthia and Daria, the two women with HIV, had to share a little of their love lives along the way – as well as economic conditions that highlighted broader issues than even their illness.

That last example stands out a little from the rest; it points to some of where I hope to go as a journalist. I’ve written more about people with MS than others, largely because of my semi-regular gig with Inside MS.  And I’ve categorized most of the work above as “looking at the intersection of fitness and disability.”  But as I expand, after journalism school, to larger markets, as I hope to do, I’m determined to integrate the “disability issues” coverage into broader considerations about health, about resources, about justice and human needs. When we talk about fitness, we don’t ask – fitness for what?  Stories like those of my friend Brendan Costello, the producer of “Largest Minority,” whose vigorous career as a writer and radio journalist is deeply hampered by his constant battles with the New York City subway system, aren’t “disability stories”: they highlight the hazards of our hyper-competitive, Type A society where resources are too rarely directed to human needs (like enough subway elevators for Brendan, who’s been in a wheelchair since 1998, to make his way effectively).

Disability, as it’s generally defined, raises questions about resources public and private. John Hockenberry, whose work awes me, has written about how Israelis in wheelchairs tended to be more affluent and athletic (“What’s your sport?” he was asked) than Palestinians who were busy tricking up wheelchairs from spare parts; in the United States, law firms and earnest nonprofits are kept busy  helping people fight to get Social Security to reimburse them for needed therapies. But why do all the current “Social Security” stories leave out the reality for people whose health has been impaired on a long-term basis? And the environmental implications of autoimmune disease have barely been touched.

How will I change the face of disability? By eliminating it, because human rights are redefined to include the right of every human being, whether it’s my autistic nephew, a war veteran, or a child in the South Bronx crippled by asthma, to fulfill his/her potential as a full member of society.

Jim Ferris, a writer from the Midwest, recently came out with a book called Hospital Poems, which I was able to review for American Book Review. He begins his book with the declaration: Let me be a poet of cripples,/of hollow men and boys groping to be whole…. all slipping and falling toward the cavern we carry within, our hidden void.” “Our hidden void.”  With that inclusive “our,” Ferris demands not compassion but empathy. Not just empathy but noise. Not just noise  but the most profound kind of respect. That’s the demand these stories can make.

, o majick movement of the wave through time

I can't believe it took me this long to blog this. Yerra Sugarman, a good friend I see far too little of, has just won the Joyce Osterweil Poetry Award from PEN -- the same writers'/free speech organization that held that First Amendment event I reported on back when the blog was new.  The prize was for her first collection of poems, Forms of Gone -- whose poems limn love, grief and historical spaces in a way I'd find addictive even if I'd never met her.  I can't think of anyone more deserving of such honors.

Over the buildings a thinning mist, dawn takes a match to.
All the fuzzy, whirring molecules spin a yarn
of oneness, then flare up, flail, and burn
from such crystal, such sobering, spectacular arsons as this.

Thistle, thistle stop your purpling.
Don't listen to the chorus of fog, its unbearable
sophistry, its prayers. How I hate its implausible reasons. O, the body,
the body. . . Body, shmody. To hell with the body.

The body can die alone on an uptown stoop,
seeking refuge from its bug-filled studio. And the damned,
duplicitous mist will weave a pall from its once soft cloak,
its membrane-over-everything. You see, how we're born:
solitary, dying, holy, broken.

And sacred are the broken, sacred the inconstant.
The pain-in-the-ass's politics, the distracted genius, curmudgeon, refugee,
and the one who would offer an only pair of good shoes to a victim of fire.
-Sacred. Sacred.

Still, no one would rename the street for her loneliness.
"Ruth," from the Hebrew whither thou goest, I will go:
half-Jewish, half-German, who spoke good Yiddish, led Vespers.
Still, we climbed the dumpster, that institute of higher learning

her belongings had been dumped into.
Never mind, she danced
for Balanchine. Too short, and so eventually condemned to backstage
after years of swallowing hormones for art's sake, for God's.
Your think artists can't be fascists? Listen, Hitler was an artist.

Never mind, she arrived in 1938, after watching him parade
through the streets of Hamburg. We use such immigrants to filigree
our words. Such immigrants suddenly silver
in memory's convenient dusklight.
And, never mind, dear alma mater, that you'd make her a refugee again
for one more dorm room. And, yes, me too. I'd kill for a place, wouldn't I?

O the body, her body, stained, soaked by its own breaking.
Squat, breathing unsteadily-but beautiful, no?-
when it once had lumbered, limping down 112th Street,
a barge towed by the cathedral.

(stanza break)

She left me a clock with a magnet on the back,
a delicate fruit bowl of amber cut-glass.
Later, my x and I fought to have her ashes
placed in that unfinished cathedral.
He, finally, convincing them. Ha! Everyone believes an historian.

Whereas me: no one believes, and no one should.
I've lied about almost everything. And still do.
An artist of sorts, from birth, you could say, who believes
truth most delicious, best served, over a steaming pasta of artifice.

She left me a black leotard, her white wooden jewelry box
hand-painted in Mexico, a silver-plated measuring cup.
And from that dumpster, we dug up her photo-album's sheer sleeves:

"Ruth on her 18th birthday,"
(in suit and beret, diamonded with sunlight);
"Ruth with Rusty, 1943, 86th Street," (cradling her large orange cat,
leaning on a balustrade);
"Ruth before Swan Lake," (gazing deeply into her own eyes);
"on her proud dad's arm";
and one of a boy, marked "cousin, Hamburg,"
dressed in the uniform of Hitler Youth.

(Who's without lies?
Who sine culpe, without error?) The body,
the body. So solitary can be a body. . .

Once upon a time, the artist I loved best did it solo in a gallery:
fetal, hidden, but heard, under a ramp. "Seed Bed,"
he called his artwork. Opal handfuls of unlastings
glistened in his cracked palms.

Handfuls of unlastings. . .
The body, the body, alone, ejecting its once child.
The scared, scarred and sacred body, broken into, then giving it away. . .
Some say the woman wastes herself if she does not have the one child.
Hers, thirty-years-old, another leaf from her archive in a dumpster.

She and I solitary together, days before she died, watching the sky thistle purple,
listening for the unbearable coming
chorus of fog, when her child, my child, would again be yoked to us,
removed from dawnfire's divisive crystal.

I told you.
I've lied about almost everything.

But while we're on the subject of prizes, I did want to note more explicitly the poem with which my girl Rachel just won City College's James Emanuel Poetry Prize. She wrote it in honor of the poet Jackson Mac Low, whose son Mordecai is one of my oldest and dearest friends.

Clack! So now jam.

a jackdaw song
a gas, a gas in collision with dust and time
the trombone part playing particle and wave
breve breve
certainly they whirr where hims are sung
in minced frequencies
yellow light bounced back to the street
purple light filters through tha balcony, the milk crate
to reach toward the stage, joining other light entertainments
controlling the siren of the theramin, not the air raid
particles of Krakatoa
to Utica by waves
to the self-defined virgin
frequency
movement of the wave through time
two hours
nostalgia postscript wavers
there are many ways to use strayers
a children's tune bathed in blood
washed clean by further juxtaposition
gift of cloudrider sub fossa
behold, the squicker putter-downer
more reels unspooled
mortal coils laid upon rice
what is the alternative to vegetable soybeans?
correspondence with iroha erased
coca? mj? no; walks
--o, c'mon slack jaw!
--clack! So now jam
slipping the tongue to
massmusik fur jungen,
ashcanned and kettledrummed off.
ectoplasmic slack now, o majick
movement of the wave through time,
on pace
pa che pa che
yo soy poisson rouge
in maple leaves
sharing the raincloth
two hours
with the impact of jellied gasoline
and dice
breve