Day 48: Santa Cruz
****
We rode all night from Los Angeles, woke up to egrets, sea otters, hawks and finally 50 high school marching bands on the streets of Santa Cruz (the place poet Peter Gizzi lovingly calls “the Deep End”) where a peculiar kind of exhaustion took over.
We scattered throughout the city, some kayaking, some swimming in the ocean and some sleeping until time came to head up to High Street where the readings happened.
A deep wooly exhaustion through which I can move and dimly perceive but most definitely not be “present” which is what we all aspire to be.
So, I leave the representation of the reading to Beth Pittinger, who put together this cento from lines at the reading.
Thank you, Dennis Morton.
Cento—On the Bus
lost in a forest of pronouns
the non-light of realism
a single answer to a complex question
I rub the grains of the moon in my hands
when you light my cigarette just that way
I am smoke
this is what my lips are for
replacing all the words
I was born in January
or maybe it was July
the signs that said yield
the uncreated still
from the periphery of another world
what if your imagination
went on vacation too
I couldn’t account for my hand
which had turned into starfish
a season arrives with its odd luggage
the gravity of each word
a loneliness about the shoulders
seen as storied
the practice is to unwind the song slowly
sound has its own horizon
long enough to plant an argument
that face driven along some high wire
without a net
that would be like little candles
having feeling for the wax
the events are so far from each other
we are zones
we became breathless
and called it busy
they have bodies
that’s all the faith they need
I’d like to reduce everything
to one syllable
face your face cranium
plant not the color green
it’s black
these fish do swim in partial language
and putting LSD in swimming pools
except some things under this seat
let it be the one who inhales the drunken
dream of a woman
crescendo denotes climax
like a fist out of a water
the better of two futures
it is where the gap is
you’re full of magic holes
concentrate seriously on the pathways
of insects
except to speak for the missing
in the shadow of a great mistake
the sensation of space where it had been once
dense and full
I must have felt the vagrant quotations
I will write for the chill of it
can the corporate highway be replaced
by a rainbow
you were my first ticket to pain
how so clear whereas before
invisible between the sky
all alphabets are manual
an absence spliced
a veined hand waving
to erect a huge disk
over are the days of background windows
is some thing a matter with you
averages predict distant moments from the past
four lines of chopped resonance
not the knowledge of smallness
and who on earth am I telling this to
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