Sesshu Foster's Blog, page 15

The steel-framed friend 1, 2, 3

1.

how about when they lay hands upon the gloomy profile, so that the glandular fear swells tumescent yellow, fatty tissue was reminiscent of a flexible, steel-framed friend, who was “modular spectacular” and “groomed arroyo”—cottage rooftops which casually descend to the level of the fences, mired in normative formulations interwoven with glad membranes (liver and aspirin) some explosions, popping noises, smoke or fumes (follicles rubbed off) once revealed as if by a receding tide, jagged crowns of rocks splashed and swirling with bubbles, dripping greasily down the paper they had pasted on the wall to cover it, the steel-framed friend (or eyeglasses, some would have it) “humidity of the poles” headed to the right “20th century straw teeth mastered by filigrees of rosy bronze as if into a sheen of air” (blistery white gum), (tooth and porcelain door knob) hand and arm reaching across the table of the landscape, unfurling disagreement and emboldening fingertips almost tapping like little balls of yarn in a fringe hanging from the curtain, so that “broken dogs” casting green “Chinese shadows” along the saline front where spots of excrement and peaches recount toilet paper rolls in alignment accordingly the hanged men of the calendar, those rubbishy fermented alcoholic notes, toward the tall immensely abbreviated folder of the steel-framed friend, not pine-scented about…

photograph by LIndsey Bolling

2

…yellow scales on the green-framed evergreen, Sino-green temperate forest map left in the car, yellowed desiccated grainery rice sheaves, grasshopper popping up into the air of Fall like summery afterthoughts, we have regular ideas about them in the Main Street plateglass, Japanese New Year plates of memory gauze smeared with aguacate-cream of swervy pulp, child weeping she said of dead greatgrandfather while she herself homeless last year, my green-framed friend turned to yellow sunshine splayed across entrance way, enemy forces and their guitars and socks and their tickets could be in Calif. or NV, or AZ, cactus bristle toothbrush mustard and watercress delight in byways and alleyways of long days gone inside long nights, thin reeds of bones played by insect messengers and amphibia in 1960’s green twilight, closing the billfold on my green-framed friend’s license, (his or her) picture of leafy shadows on headlight wall flashing past momentarily like the gantry of space rocket, chopsticks could be used to extract from car collision the bits of still useful trembling, Oakland there mighty amber “All our agents are currently on another call, please hold on the line and we will get back to you in a moment,” green-frame

3.

4-41-framed friend, 326 fan palm trees tilted in the brushfire, sugar my 4-41 on one side a sidewalk and not on the other, one side side sunny sunny and hot and hot and not not another another, 1965 Mercury Marauder sniffling choked up with sentimentalism of 4-41-framed friend, bent side mirror flying off at high speed on the Interstate, she kept you coming back, didn’t she, so? Swap old man in furnished room for old man in managed-care facility with roads, shuddering hamburger case full of articulate cartridges sparkly like thighs of juniper thought of tomorrow—which went by parade “of history”—through passive Mediterranean or Caribbean lateral differentiation we didn’t decide one way or the other, it was done by animals, the rest was holding laminated national forests I surmised, I appreciated 4-41-framed coherent sea coast you remember, the biological (hanged men of the century)

The steel-framed friend 1

1.

how about when they lay hands upon the gloomy profile, so that the glandular fear swells tumescent yellow, fatty tissue was reminiscent of a flexible, steel-framed friend, who was “modular spectacular” and “groomed arroyo”—cottage rooftops which casually descend to the level of the fences, mired in normative formulations interwoven with glad membranes (liver and aspirin) some explosions, popping noises, smoke or fumes (follicles rubbed off) once revealed as if by a receding tide, jagged crowns of rocks splashed and swirling with bubbles, dripping greasily down the paper they had pasted on the wall to cover it, the steel-framed friend (or eyeglasses, some would have it) “humidity of the poles” headed to the right “20th century straw teeth mastered by filigrees of rosy bronze as if into a sheen of air” (blistery white gum), (tooth and porcelain door knob) hand and arm reaching across the table of the landscape, unfurling disagreement and emboldening fingertips almost tapping like little balls of yarn in a fringe hanging from the curtain, so that “broken dogs” casting green “Chinese shadows” along the saline front where spots of excrement and peaches recount toilet paper rolls in alignment accordingly the hanged men of the calendar, those rubbishy fermented alcoholic notes, toward the tall immensely abbreviated folder of the steel-framed friend, not pine-scented about…

photograph by LIndsey Bolling

postcard to Lisa

postcard to lisa

“In Chamacuaro in 1923 lightning struck the door of ther temple and many women were thrown to the floor. Eufrosina Nieto, who was one of the fallen, invoked the miraculous Saint Nicholas and nobody died.”

She got up at 7 AM and probably ran five miles on the arroyo seco, which drains into the L.A. River, when storms run out of Hahamongna watershed, a Pasadena City-owned watershed where they siphon water for their town from the San Gabriel Mountains.

Yesterday evening we hiked down into the arroyo from Devil’s Gate Dam, which holds back a reservoir full of dry white gravel.  We carried a blue-throated skink and a red-eared box turtle.

They had been carried off athletic fields, which get regular soakings from sprinklers, by maintenance men and kids who delivered them to her to dispose of. We walked down the rocky eroded trail into the canyon of the arroyo in toyon, alder, eucalyptus, yucca, creosote, buckeye, buckwheat and brush, looking for water holes and found none.

Drought. Even as we drove north through Pasadena, past barriers and cops directing traffic away from some mass spectacle at the Rose Bowl, where ten of thousands of teenage girls and their moms were amassing for who knows what weird ceremonies and rituals (and traffic was royally fucked up, cops everywhere, parked at intersections, light bars flashing), brown smoke of fires rose from the south (from Chino Hills?) and from the west, smearing the sunset with rusty color.

Although she was hungry and protested against it, we parked in the falling dark and took a flashlight and walked in the dark up the creek behind the lights shining in the new parking structure at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory campus, with its parking lot emptying out, last workers on satellites and space projects, mars probes and secrets of outer space, project managers (one of whom we know is a belly dancer in her spare time) and rocket scientists heading home to the freeway home, an owl in the tree looking down on us as we looked down on JPL.

We crossed the first bridge over the creek and found flowing water under it. The skink was let loose in the sand by the boulders and the turtle was placed on the edge of a pool in the rocks, under white alder. It waited awhile, emerging from its shell, to stalk into the pool.

Night mountain bike riders with lights mounted on their helmets passed us heading up into the dry rocky mountains. The owl was gone. We drove to our favorite Thai restaurant.

And the Chinese kid who drowned, he is alive, though with visible brain damage—he is back in school, fighting to regain the life he lost and grabbed back. His hands shake, he has weakness and short term memory loss from the stroke, but day by day he is fighting his way back.

review of “made in l.a.” at the ucla hammer museum

it’s okay that the artists are all white, even the nonwhite artists (2?) are kind of white

it’s okay that the curators are all white, it’s

okay that the l.a. reflected in this show is like the l.a. in robert altman’s “shortcuts” which is a strange all-white l.a.

(in charlton heston’s “omega man,” (1971) i think the head vampire or whatever they were who was menacing the ‘real’ last human beings on earth, that is the humans who were not vampires or whatever (all white, except maybe the black woman hipster with her militant afro) was black)

let’s not go into “planet of the apes” at this juncture, but in the apartheid imagination of the future white people are in peril, isolated with jutting jaw of manifest destiny determination like charlton heston with his guns and his alzheimer’s

it’s okay that the curators at the ucla hammer museum think that ‘minorities’ are best represented by white queer artists (that shows diversity like on “star trek” the aliens are white people who wear prosthetic make-up or paint their skin blue or green—that’s a kind of diversity)

it’s okay that the white artists who are queer artists don’t have anything to do with POC (people of color)

it’s okay in the little museum labels where the curators note the background, issues and ideas in the artist’s work, that none of it referenced POC even when it mentioned “highest rates of incarceration in the world in spite of having only 5% of the worlds population” (it’s okay not to mention that blacks and latinos make up 60% of the incarcerated even though they are 30% of the american people)

it’s okay

it’s all right, like when i sat in one day in marilyn robinson’s mfa writing class at the university of iowa and she shared her course reading list which was all white except for one book by the only black writer and only POC in creative writing at U of I, and she asked did anyone have any remarks or suggestions, and i said, apart from the one, the reading list isn’t very diverse, it’s all white

robinson didn’t answer, she just smiled and white students (maybe i was the only nonwhite in the room) said, “it’s a very diverse list, already” and “yes, for example, look at all the women writers” and “and kafka,” one added

and robinson just smiled

and i left

that’s all right

it’s okay

that was in 1994, 20 years ago

it’s okay 20 years later to walk through the ucla hammer museum through an all white show

when i was a kid i thought maybe american apartheid would slowly change

and now we have a black president who does everything white presidents do

he does everything just like them, all his policies are the same—he’s like colin powell

and in the 1990s i felt like things could change, maybe

but now i see white thinking’s not changing and this exhibit and the exhibits at every other museum in the city show this, but

it’s all right because the ucla hammer museum curated and hosted “now dig this! art and black los angeles 1960 – 1980” which exhibited from october 2011 to january 2012

so it’s okay, because “black los angeles” had its day

it had the one exhibit

it has black history month every year

it had wanda coleman (in those days)

so it’s okay that all the official museums in l.a. show white art all the time

it’s okay because you can go to the “california african american museum” if you want to see art by POC or you can drive to long beach to the museum of latin american art, or the l.a. county museum of art probably has one or two frida kahlos or diego riveras and some great precolombian ceramics

so it’s okay

if the all the other museums like lacma and moca and etc. show white art at all times

asco had it’s one lacma show “asco: the elite of the obscure, a retrospective 1972 – 1987” on exhibition from sept. 2011 to december 2011, so it’s okay

they had that one

one is good, now we can go back to our regularly scheduled programming

like after a public service announcement

it’s okay that the apartheid imagination remains in place and is not disrupted

thank you

that reassurance is like walking on a broken toe

 

sesshu foster

alhambra, ca

If you peeked and saw Gaza

Probably you were making love a couple times, you were getting busy.

Laying sod, planting trees, paving a walkway. Perhaps you called your mother.

Perhaps your child. Driving from L.A. to the Mexican border can take what.

The estimate for the bathroom, 15 to 20K. What’s the weather going to be like, when you arrive?

Something about Gaza. The woman’s car in the intersection…

You parked and by the time you got there, two other guys showed up to help push.

Rutsu 18, or Tokoro in S. Pasadena? Bombed out buildings like from World War II, gray concrete dust.

Gray concrete dust on survivors. The Israelis.

News on in another room; saturated arena colors of a flat screen in a sports bar, Washington DC?

Dim sports bar? A toddler cradled in a hunched father’s arms, missing the top of the head.

How much had you? How much more to drink? Two or three maybe.

Phrase, tit for tat, something like that. It canceled out. How much money was it to you?

New appliances, developments in robotics, software versus hardware. Debt.

How’s traffic? How’s it look? If you peeked and saw Gaza you saw it.

You saw the end of your world, your own death in a way, the limit of sighs.

A breath, your own, and someone talking, saying something you didn’t quite catch.

Hedges, fences and trees as you drive on. Houses, neighborhoods of night streets. Little universes.

 

Holy Virgin Postcard

“On 3 of January 1886, Macsimino Lopez from Hacienda de Guadalupe was falsely accused by some enemies of being a highwayman and reported to the authorities of Guanajuato, who decided to use the current fugitive law {execution by firing squad} in his prosecution, but this never happened due to the grace of the Holy Virgin after offering her this retablo.”

 

 

Hey Dave, 90s here must be frying like a skillet in Chico

but it must rain in a decade or 2

I had a student a couple years ago with mental illness

a great kid, runny and super-intelligent (like they can be)

he used to come talk to me in off-hours about his ups and downs

obsessing about one girl who loathes him and the attention his attention brings

he draws Japanese manga comic books about everything and she features in many

both are Chicanos but in his comic books she looks like a Japanese anime cartoon, big eyes, round face

but the last time I saw him, hunched over in the library at a table alone, lost in his obsessions

trapped in his isolation and weird (comic book interpolated) single-track schizophrenic ideas

they later told me he was having delusions that the whole school was conspiring about him

because of that girl) though it had been years since he was told that she did not want him to speak to her

he continued to ask counselors to put him in the same classes with her—but of course they refused

so it must be because of on-going conspiracy of everyone who knows him

anyway the poor crazed kid hunched in his hoodie, on his meds but still isolated and lost in delusions

like endless Japanese manga reminds me of America, USA could be doing great positive things in the world

(this kid could have had a great life, with his brilliance) saving lives and saving itself

but no, it’s lost in crazed obsessions of money and power (all slipping the faster from its grasp)

obsessed with paranoia, fear and terrorism, and we must be trapped with it in wars, waste and negativity—

 

“Bomb Crater Sky,” by Lâm Thị Mỹ Dạ

Lâm Thị Mỹ Dạ

 



They say that you, a road builder
Had such love for our country
You rushed out and waved your torch
To call the bombs down on yourself
And save the road for the troops

As my unit passed on that worn road
The bomb crater reminded us of your story
Your grave is radiant with bright-colored stones
Piled high with love for you, a young girl

As I looked in the bomb crater where you died
The rain water became a patch of sky
Our country is kind
Water from the sky washes pain away

Now you lie down deep in the earth
As the sky lay down in that earthen crater
At night your soul sheds light
Like the dazzling stars
Did your soft white skin
Become a bank of white clouds?

By day I pass under a sun-flooded sky
And it is your sky
And that anxious, wakeful disc
Is it the sun, or is it your heart
Lighting my way
As I walk down the long road?

The name of the road is your name
Your death is a young girl’s patch of blue sky
My soul is lit by your life

And my friends, who never saw you
Each has a different image of your face

From Green Rice by Lam Thi My Da. Translated by Martha Collins and Thuy Dinh. Used with permission of Curbstone Press.

Lam Thi My Da is one of Vietnam’s best known writers. She comes from Quang Binh Province, in the central part of Vietnam, an area that saw a great deal of fighting during the war. A graduate of the Writer’s College in Vietnam, she has worked as a reporter and a literary editor. She has written five books of poetry and her work, Dedicated to a Dream, received the highest honors from the National United Board of Vietnamese Literature and the Arts. Translations of her poems have been featured in Six Vietnamese Poets, published in the United States by Curbstone. She has also published three collections of stories for children.

see also http://www.thebluemoon.com/poetry/ltm...
and http://www.rattle.com/poetry/the-nigh...
 
her book of selected poems, Green Rice, translated by Martha Collins and Thuy Dinh, is available here: http://www.alibris.com/Green-Rice-Poe...
 

reviewed by Maxine Hong Kingston here http://www.waterbridgereview.org/0920...

published by Curbstone Press, 2005, Willimantic, CT

Poem for the Year of the Buffalo

I was born in the year of the buffalo
A year that brings many troubles
A buffalo toils all year round
Works hard but never grumbles

When i was very small I walked
With my buffalo to the village fields
Green grass, high flying kites
Buffalo and I would daydream

There was so much wind
In the wide open fields
There was so much sun
Buffalo’s eyes would brim

Don’t play music near a buffalos ear-
Please don’t tell me that
If a buffalo looks, a buffalo knows
It doesn’t need to hear

I left home a long time ago
But when spring comes I go back
There I meet the black buffalo
Still attentive, innocent

The buffalo eats grass all day
Spring offers up grass again
Thanks to heaven for watching over
The buffalo’s youth, that never ends.

-Lam Thi My Da

translated by Thuy Dinh and Martha Collins

waiting in a parking lot

The 60 was Closed 10 car accident milk tanker truck hit the divider and tipped over onto cars. Some burned a 5 year old girl died some critical injured some minor injuried traffic closed in both directions the truck partly went over center divider into oncoming traffic. Milk spilled… helicopters circling two tow trucks just drove past hauling 3 wrecked cars one totally burned out no glass or rubber left on it. …Bright summer day smog haze on san gabriel valley. The helicopters have left and the freeway must have opened westbound by now as traffic is no longer backed up at a standstill its moving. Heavy trucks rolling by. People will be heading to the hospital fighting for their lives.

“Plea,” by Bob Kaufman

Voyager, wanderer of the heart,

Off to

          a million midnights, black, black

Voyager, wanderer of star worlds,

Off to

          a million tomorrows, black, black,

Seek and find Hiroshima’s children,

Send them back, send them back,.

Tear open concrete sealed cathedrals, spiritually locked

Fill vacant theaters with their musty diversions,

Almost forgotten laughter.

Give us back the twisted sons

Poisoned by mildewed fathers.

Find again the used up whores,

Dying in some forgotten corner,

Find sunlight, and barking dogs,

For the lost, decayed in sorry jails.

Find pity, find Hell for wax bitches,

Hidden in the bowels of male Cadillacs.

Find tomorrow and next time for Negro millionaires

Hopelessly trapped in their luxurious complexions.

Find love, and an everlasting fix for hopeless junkies,

Stealing into lost nights, long time.

Voyager now,

                          Off to a million midnights, black, black

Seek and find Hiroshima’s children,

                           Send them back, send them back.

Bob Kaufman (1925 – 1986)

Bob Kaufman

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ip4__wnWhvQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aP8-MpCC_8

see also

Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness:

http://www.powells.com/biblio/61-9780811208017-0

The Ancient Rain:

http://www.powells.com/biblio/61-9780811208017-0

Cranial Guitar: Selected Poems

http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9781566890380-4

sorry to the spiders

sorry to the spider i washed down the drain first thing in the morning

i didn’t see you in the shower without my glasses on

by the time i bent down to look at you the hot water curled you up

then you were gone, gone down the drain

in the steaming shower—did you enter the shower

on my hair? i can’t see well, bleary from text and screen and work.

i move about the world by habit, without seeing sometimes.

i apologize to all the spiders i crushed, stomped on, smeared

as they scuttled and ran for cover, as they tried to get away.

none was attacking me and i killed them for no real reason.

your fear of looming death seemed to frighten me tremendously.

sorry to the spider i crushed with a cup, the lip of a cup

you were so fast, so big with your long shiny legs

and so fast your movement was somewhat frightening—lightning—

when i slammed the cup on the bookshelf

you were already halfway escaped of it, it crushed your cephalothorax.

instantly you curled up like a dead hand that would never move no more

and i thought that maybe you were a mother, strong and feminine—

maybe the mother of these tiny baby spiders that sometimes i mistake

for ants, sometimes i have washed them down the sink before i recognize

what i am seeing, and i killed you, crushed like a broken umbrella

upsidedown, but i have been finding your babies in the sinks

and lifting them outside when i can if they will crawl along my finger

or on a corner of a piece of paper.

sorry, spiders, for killing you without even noticing

like the one i found once, when i opened a book

and the spider’s juice stuck exoskeletal parts on the page

like a phrase. i know we share this same house;

i never see the little bugs, flies and larvae that you eat

—thanks for eating them, i don’t want them in my books,

i don’t want them in my cupboards and food containers,

if i see you crawling across the floor of the summer

i will open the door for you, for both of us so we can get out.