Solving Differential Equations

I am getting old. I still demand miracles. I am headed for a closet gaudy w/memories. Each brick bails, trying to understand is masturbating in quicksand. poetry is resistance but so much dirt is stirred the water comes cloudy resinuous w/confusion. Score: anarchy one, god one less. I like: the way things can sound, pleasure in a relief map, my own desires.

I know I will never understand. This seems to be a rule/to keep things interesting. The game is just poker: You grab instinctually for the high hat, you bluff the players, or you sit hard on the few cards you have. So I lose to keep everyone happy, and in the game (mother assigned me this role). But it grows in me that losing is now my process. My luck runs against me when I need to win. I can't bluff, forgotten how.

Playing understanding game/god=disappointment. Can I tell you how? To stand shitless with wizards, your rings owning your fingers. We play it/again. You love me? Oh maybe you/hate me. Up this mountain, on this vocal track/your father or brother or a madman or a magistrate, someone from the front office wearing a tourniquet/we live so close to the ballooon's skin. All I see now is molecular interface; plasma bondings are prayers trying to hold this humanness together. But dissolution seems inevitable.

Another tone poem, cleaned up, from the late 1970s. There are some truthy statements in there, as Colbert would say. The business about letting other people win was something my mother required me to do as a child. I believe it truly colored everything I have done since. It combines with my younger brother Greg's absolute need to win at everything. So he win, and I lost, and here we all are, some years later. I don't talk to him, needless to say. But he didn't talk to me, first. There you have it. Another Osburn family fuckup. Not much left of Don and Margaret's vision of their children. Well, I hate to include my Dad, as he really seemed to love you no matter how screwy you were. But my mom really needed to be important and she needed her children to give her talking points and be important too. Nothing else seemed to matter to her. Probably that isn't so, but it's what I took away from my childhood.

This piece is dense, but it was worse. I cleaned it up quite a bit. Hopefully one can get something useful out of it. The ring reference is of course to the One Ring. I owned no personal rings at this pint in time, and actually in my whole life the only ring I have ever consistently worn is the one I wear now, the token of my marriage to Kimb Britton. My lucky ring, you could say.

Memory's Song

Seeking memory the second verse in the song
Partial lyrics painted across the valley an orchard
Of songs melodies implicit in the under
Standing beneath the waterfalling hours
Some young women in harmony one already
Lost to the cold river taking us away.

If life is loss and grief
(and it is, it is)
then memory is the coin
passing hands and a sudden
sight of you in the rearview
mirror is a true gift.

Daddy and Momma and Rosie and George Painter
This is ten years later but you are still bright in the dark
Sky I see when I lie down, determined not to join you
Just yet. Your words in my papers, your image on
A videotape from first night.

Seeking memory. I
Don’t wish to relive that time.
Only not to lose it.
Not to lose you.

Spaulding Gray found it out: this consciousness stuff
Isn’t worth a crap without a decent retrieval system.
Don’t forget that

NOTES: The first stanza is based on that song about "don't go chasing waterfalls ..." by a three girl group, one of whom is now dead. The members of the list are all people who passed in the same one year period nearly ten years ago now. Spaulding Gray, the monologuist, was in an accident in Ireland and lost some of his ability to recall his life. That was essentially the basis of what he did. Earlier this year he apparently jumped off a ferry in the harbor at NYC and drowned. They eventually recovered his body. I saw Spaulding Gray here in CU at Krannert several years ago. He did a monologue called "Slippery Slope" ostensibly about learning to ski. A great deal of the story revolved around his changing his life completely and having a child at the late age of 53. His story encouraged me to have my own late child. I am sorry for him that he had to leave, but I honor his choice. I am very sorry that Rosie and George Painter both had to leave; they were only 49 and both were fine writers and sweet, valuable human beings. My dad, I believe, left of his own volition. My mother fought until the end. I remember you all and keep your words in my files and read you when I can. I spent a good deal of yesterday reading through all the cards and notes I received from Jane Morrel in the fourteen years I knew her.