On the Mother's Side

Knowing a quiet root, the mother refutes the profane with a sidewise glance.

 

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"Mothers are like that" – always unattributed, but only occasionally in scare quotes.

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A bifocal faith: I believe you, so long as you are what you are.

3.7.11

There is confession and then there is Tripoli.

Which is to say that confession communicates the least.

3.6.11

All this language training, and then it's the 'bas-reliefs of earth.' There's no scale for speaking absent the target. A mass of curls, a human project, a boy to speak to –– the mottos exhaust the givens.

And then there's this motto: Candor is the brightest shield.

I want nothing more than direct address, though it delivers nothing more than a person, and that won't be enough.

3.5.11

A motto, out of deep water, and then abandoned to quotation, as say the 'white creature of chalk pounded', or material sum. These examples won't explain it, and can't infuse like a drumbeat these four limbs you're still testing, and testing.

Grow old with me, laboratory.

3.3.11

Coactivity is the evidence of trust. This son, in his busybody quickening, could hatch societies from all of this sudden planning.

I'm only a bondsman in my heart, and my instruction could never be fair to this exuberance: "first ideas." And not just mine.

3.1.11

I'm proposing that thankfulness stands apart from decay. It's not a grooming, or unequal reaction to some splintering oak in the backyard. But it's neither indifferent, this positive, furtive strength.

I'm proposing it, as if it were some eternal notion.

2.16.11

Enduring task lists, the 'yous' that accumulate in this spasm of accountability.

You are the low answer. You, this accommodationist.

2.8.11

Books thrown to the floor, a test, and protocols scattered. And my 'role' to be corrective, as if the right way lost.

Does forgiveness presume an assignment?

12.28.10

Dogs are beacons for the fantasist –– never reducible to mere appetite and exchange.

A purely transactional relationship with a dog is a draining curse.

10.25.10

You're always young on this cracker earth. Quit angling for the impenetrable precedent. The point is to be thankful for the ducts.

10.23.10

A friend's status message always reads: "warm & mandatory."

And I always think, this must be the father's voice.

10.22.10

Fog delay. It sounds like a weapon, but so does childhood in a certain context.

10.21.10

The no-no bird, the turning of the crank. It squeaks, I speak.

And the character of seniority? Described by the ratio of leisure and complaint.

10.17.10

"Son" is small, and "small" is a picture of how we care for the small thing.

We all need a massive background.

10.9.10

All this concern for containment, when the smell of a biscuit lifts every roof.

10.7.10

From the inside out, he learns each day that an apple is not a pomegranate.

To bear fruit, he thinks it inside out.

8.17.10

Behind the "incalculable balances", the cruelty of the parent's corrections. Against the improvisations of the child, he bestows a degenerative gift: personhood.

8.16.10

Masanobu Kuno sat down and hand-wrote the lines:

"Do not envy the fathers of others."

"I can't be your horse to ride, but you two be good friends."

"Please be an unbeatable person like your father and avenge my death."

No line from there to here, no line to steer the fingertip across the face, no line to stay the instruction.

8.15.10

The father proves nothing by immobility. To join to the occasion, he must follow, and follow, and follow, and follow.

8.14.10

At twenty months, the son is the gladdest usher.