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Poet Craig Arnold is missing in Japan. Learn more at:

http://findcraigarnold.blogspot.com/

Radio, Radio

About a month or so ago, I was interviewed by Dick Gordon, host of The Story, a public radio program produced by American Public Media, who also do Garrison Keillor's show. I'm not sure I can stand listening to myself, but the interview airs today. Check your local listings, or listen to the stream here.

I had a great time and thanks to everyone.

Lassitude

I'm reading tomorrow night, along with poet Megan Volpert, at the Georgia Center for the Book. Be there by 7:15 p.m. when the fun begins. I read there last fall with Thomas Lux and won't repeat a single poem. Or I'll try not. Definitely some new work.

***

I've been absorbed with finishing the memoir. In the last week or so, I've added approximately 10,000 words to the book. The end is near, not exactly mirage-like. But the middle is. What to say about those dull, largely forgettable late teen age years? Dunno. Must figure all that out. Later, rewrite everything.

***

I have 6 weeks.

***

I want it to matter.

***

See you tomorrow night?

Cuz we belong together, yeah

Were I to peek through the blinds just now, outside everything would be spring: flood of sun and warmth and the (not uber-hyped-up social networking site) twitter of lean little birds and an ur-sky, blue, without end, Amen. I never can adequately express how glad of spring's onset that I am. A parole from winter, my rickety body.

And how silent has it been here? Cobwebbed, even. I haven't had much I wanted to say. At some point a blog becomes a chore and then it's best to step away from the blasted thing. But, with the return of clement weather, I fell less interior, less of a layered mind. Let's see what happens.

***

So much has gone on these last few months, some of it good, some bad, some fleetingly infuriating.

***

Today word from Ecco on My Index's sales numbers, which were wildly beyond what I would have predicted. Thank you to everyone who has purchased it.

The cost of that success is that Ecco/HarperCollins wants to push up the release of my memoir, One More Theory About Happiness, to May 2010, to coincide with the release of the paperback edition of Index. This was always a possibility, discussed, even, shortly after signing with Ecco. Now it's the real deal, sho nuff, and it's all great, except now I have to very seriously finish the darn thing. No sleep till Brooklyn, I guess. I'm not sure what I mean, except: holy crap, time to buckle down, y'all.

To that end, I've been working on a chapter about the time I got mugged.

Tonight

An interesting review of My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge is up over at Bookslut.

Rawk

Thanks to the wonderful Allison Joseph for this photo.

Hey

AGNOSIA

It’s not that I don’t believe, or never did, or can’t again,
in the tumescent red fable of Santa Claus, exploding
from the mythic chimney we never had, and it’s not
that I was never a child who half-shivered in sleep
the night before the now creepy home invasion
of the Easter Bunny, mute and anthropomorphic
and egg laden and sugar floured, and I confess all
the enmity I ever kept for my milk teeth,
hoping to shed them one by one by one,
to peer for a while at their weird, blood-flecked roots
before hiding them beneath my head
for a fairy engaged in economies
I wish I could grasp. It’s not that I don’t believe in,
of all things, love, because I do
with the bruised zeal of falling objects.
Or fear, though last night I waited
for you or for the storm to rip away this roof
and there were times when
it was easy to imagine everything
peeling away, gone into the rattling night,
dropping into a field with cows
on their knees in the darkness,
all the clover turned ink by an absent moon.
Though I am not proud, I’ve laughed
at the pain of others, who stumbled
in the parking lots of grocery stores,
cans of rolled biscuit dough exploding
with surprising force on the asphalt,
and though I wished them an instant invisibility,
still I watched and watched. But,
what could I do, when helped to stand
in another lot, beside another car,
a wheelchair unfolded behind me, waiting,
what could I say to the man
who asked if we needed help
and, looking down, I could see my pants
crumpled about my ankles,
how like a dark flag of shame they were then,
in summer, the sun on my skin
and all the eyes of passing consumers,
that title we should despise
but don’t. What could I say but yes
or no or that it hardly mattered
if I couldn’t feel the difference anyway?
And that was a pain, but his,
added to all the rest, soon forgotten
or ignored or left to pretense—
it’s not that I don’t believe
in the sour thrum of shame
or that my face has never turned to blood
or believed in a lie
so desperately that eventual truth was almost lethal.
I have, I have, so help me,
I have.

Pre

BEFORE

Maybe I’m done with tragedy; I can’t say how
long I’ve loved without cease fire peeling
away from the Hindenburg like skin. That
nobody knows that infamous voiceover
was really recorded days later, the film silent
before being spliced into newsreels,
I love to tell others, though I’m unsure why.
And I loved the smaller fires
a boy could imagine, feverishly plot, finally make
with thieved matches and rolls
of toilet paper, paper ripped from magazines,
rotten fruit. Once, in my hand,
a thing blew up and through all
my fingers I felt the shock shove through.
Nothing was severed, made
stumps, though my ears filled up
with what seemed was wet
silence, cotton soaked through, packed deep.
At night, now, with my ears
pressed into pillows, the night
pressing back, below or beyond
the little breaths of my love
there is a high sharpness, a ringing
that marks narrow escape.
To think of it, to see again that sea teal sky,
is to feel summer. Now,
it’s winter and all day comes
hateful rain, spattering this part
of the world with the maddening stubbornness
of weather. In bed I’m alone
no longer and even in love
some small part of my brain seeks
to nurse a disbelief. But,
maybe I am done with tragedy,
no matter how seductive its narratives all are.
Even this is a story, these words,
all this shaped air, this habit
of speaking to whatever is broken,
or once was, or might be. True
to say that none of it, none of it,
matters. Why does it seem right
to now speak of flowers?
The pallid lily, the hydrangea like foam from a wave.
I don’t know. All I care
is that we map out
with our bodies the night’s blindness. That we begin.