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translated by Edmund Keeley and George Savidis

dressed up as “friends,”
came countless times, my enemies,
trampling the primeval soil.
And the soil never blended with their heel.
They brought
The Wise One, the Founder, and the Geometer,
Bibles of letters and numbers,
every kind of Submission and Power,
to sway over the primeval light.
And the light never blended with their roof.
Not even a bee was fooled into beginning the golden game,
not even a Zephyr into swelling the white aprons.
On the peaks, in the valleys, in the ports
they raised and founded
mighty towers and villas,
floating timbers and other vessels;
and the Laws decreeing the pursuit of profit
they applied to the primeval measure.
And the measure never blended with their thinking.
Not even a footprint of a god left a man on their soul,
not even a fairy’s glance tried to rob them of their speech.
They came
dressed as “friends,”
came countless times, my enemies,
bearing the primeval gifts.
And their gifts were nothing else
but iron and fire only.
To the open expecting fingers
only weapons and iron and fire.
Only weapons and iron and fire.

I’ve been writing a bit about art in the last few issues of Open Letters Monthly. Last month it was my very special relationship to John Singer Sargent, this month, the glam and decay of John Bonath’s Strange Beauties at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science:

In order to reach A Strange Beauty, which is entirely worth a visit to the mountain west, you’ll cross the museum’s T-Rex-occupied entryway and take a right through the Space Odyssey rooms (spinning projections of the earth, Is There Water on Mars?, children jumping and pointing and squealing) until you emerge on the West Side. The room, the gallery, is three stories high with glass walls displaying the finest view in Denver: City Park Pond, backgrounded by the steel and glass towers of downtown, themselves backgrounded by the gold foothills and the white-topped Rockies.

At a distance, the images on floor one resemble their photographs (like the photographs accompanying this article), but as you get closer, the illusion of verisimilitude breaks down, and their painterly qualities become apparent. These are, in fact, paintings. They’re single objects: gold nuggets, skulls, a bat, tagged birds, ammonites, set against black backgrounds that seem to let them float in space, anchorless. This makes them more solid, more tangible. Further inspection reveals other alterations to enhance their contours—pointillist colors invisible at a distance cause the objects to swing free of their frames, to pop. A transparent medium mixed with iridescent pigments catches the room light and makes the objects more real still. They’re splendidly alive, far more than their originals, some of which are present under glass, and look, in comparison, strikingly dead.

Speaking of those white-topped Rockies, they’re my new friends in life. In case you’ve not heard I’ve moved west. Elisa and I drove out here just over two months ago in a straight line from Boston. On the afternoon we arrived in Boulder in time to catch my friend Katie’s sculpture opening (electronic ligaments in milky plasticine, hung translucently along the gallery’s windows) and saw a double rainbow in the fuzzy mist of the sky, plains side. It has been an adventure since. We’ve been up in the mountains a few times (the red clay looks purple with the sun going down) and we’ve made some intriguing new friends and picked up where we left off with some old ones.

I’m not used to moving and very much unused to the way it clears your mind — ten thousand things that seemed so breathlessly important in Boston aren’t important at all out here; they’ve just fallen away and disappeared. I’m spending at least half of my time in mind of my new classes — Blake, Baudelaire, Tolstoy, and how do you write a persuasive essay after all? Funny enough, I wake up early now, up before Elisa half the time, which never happened in Boston, even once. Like everyone always said, it’s cold in the morning and sunny in the afternoons. I’ve been listening to Brian Eno (Tracks and Traces) and of course I picked up the new Tom Waits. Humming “Back in the Crowd”:

translated by Edmund Keeley

“I went down to the St. James Infirmary.”

I got lost in the town.
The gardens are hidden by the hospital of Don Juan Tavera.
Advertisements wrapping up the streets.
Each man walks without knowing
whether he’s at a beginning or an end,
whether he’s going to his mother, his daughter, or his mistress
whether he’ll judge or be judged
whether he’ll escape, whether he’s escaped already;
he doesn’t know.
At every corner a gramophone shop
in every shop a hundred gramophones
for each gramophone a hundred records
on every record
someone living plays with someone dead.
Take the steel needle and separate them
if you can.

Now what poet? Do you remember what poet
tried out the steel needle
on the seams of man’s skull?

Do you remember his song that night?
I remember that he asked us for an asprin
his eyes moved inside black rings
he was pale, and two deep wrinkles
bound his forehead. Or was it you
maybe? Or me? Or was it maybe
silent Antigone with those shoulders
rounded over her breasts?
I kept her with me ten nights
and each dawn she would weep for her child.
I remember I was looking for a pharmacy. For whom, I don’t know.
they were all closed.

I got lost in the town
no one is going to remove the hospital
full of crippled children gesturing
at me or at others following me.
odors of medicine in the air
turn heavy, fall in love and mesh
with vapors from cars going off
to the country with pre-Raphaelite couples
thoroughly blond if somehow a bit evaporated.

In the spring of 1923, Livia Rimini,
the film star, died in her bath;
they found her dead amidst her perfume
and the water was not yet cold.
yet in the movies yesterday
she gazed at me with her useless eyes.

I’m teaching Fiction I at Grub Street this season, after a short tricky stint in Fiction II over the winter. Maybe it was just the winter that was tricky. I met some truly fine people, though, and I’m happy still to know them after the class is through.

I’ve taught Fiction I before & Grub Street wants the same basics covered each time (character, dialog, plot — I’d cover them anyway), but I’ve picked a few different stories for this go round. I’m a little pleased with my picks, I have to say. The’d make a nice pocket-sized anthology for anytime, anymind.

1: Fiction Basics
reading: “Twenty-Two Stories” by Paul Theroux
(I was never a Paul Theroux fan until I started reading him closely, then I realized there was nothing, nothing he didn’t know about craft)

2: Characters
reading: “The Beau Monde of Mrs. Bridge” by Evan S. Connell
reading the first half “The Old Order” by Katherine Anne Porter
(of course this could just as easily been any number of stories by either writer: “He” or “Magic” or “The Fisherman from Chihuahua”)

3: More Characters
reading: “1917” by Mary Swan
reading: “The Bees, Part 1” by Alexander Hemon
(after reading “1917″ in Harpers I was so excited to read The Deep, then I realized with some disappointment that “1917″ was the best thing in it. I recently read a story that ripped it off, as a matter of fact, though now I can’t remember where.)

4: Plot
reading: “Love and Hydrogen” by Jim Shepard
(he does his research) 

5: Dialogue
reading: “Bingo and the Little Woman” by P.G. Wodehouse
(It’s really hard to find someone who writes good dialog. Odd because it feels so easy to write. I’d hardly call Wodehouse ‘accurate’ but I’ve never read any dialog that’s funnier anywhere) 

6: Setting
reading: “The Hermit’s Story” by Rick Bass
(its the snipe that sell this one)

7: POV
reading: “A Tortoise for the Queen of Tonga” by Julia Whitty
(eerily, this was another one from Harpers where the story bests the book. Still, it’s a hell of a story. I will go to Tonga)

8: Style
reading: “Big Blonde” By Dorothy Parker
(one of the saddest of all of her sad, pitch-perfect stories. Honestly, who writes better prose than Dorothy Parker? I think its criminal that we’re so familiar with the quips we don’t bother spending time with her best art)

9: Revision
reading: “Toward the Interior” by Joshua Harmon
(why doesn’t this guy write more fiction?)

10: Publishing
reading the conclusion of “The Old Order” by Katherine Anne Porter

Circling down on Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport, I was startled to see how the land rolled. The portions of Ohio I’d traveled before — the north parts — were flat as a floor, but the land around Cincinnati was all rilled. Dana, the venerable designer and all-’round Moneypenney at Miami U Press collected me in Kentucky and brought me through five minutes of Indiana and into Oxford where I had a great dinner with some of the folks at the school and woke up in an antique guest house with a sunny porch and unseasonably springlike weather.

The visit followed on like this, one good encounter after another. David Schloss, my editor and benefactor, turned out to be as fun to spend a day with as he was to edit a book with. Ken Tuma, head of the press, was entertainingly salty. Cathy Wagner and her young friend Ambrose delighted. And Margaret Luongo, who I didn’t talk with enough at dinner, turns out to be one of the best short story writers I’ve read in years. I’ll be bugging her.

Out in Washington DC a few days later Open Letters‘ Editor-at-large, J. Eaton took me for a ride in his Harley Sportster down Dolly Madison Blvd. . Coming back to DC he said, “watch how the tops of DC appear to our left — they suddenly come into view, like you’re coming into a European city.” They did. Later, I nearly stumbled into/destroyed Henry VIII’s Christmas-list-under-glass at the Folger Shakespeare Library. I toured surrealist cinima with forthcoming book writer Maureen Thorson. I read outloud in Adams Morgan for Barrellhouse and the gracious Dan Brady. I puffed cigars & ruminated weightily on Paradise Lost on a wrought-iron porch with our Editor-at-large and Adam Golaski.

Home and hungry, I swung by my local Indian place and tried the special, Duck Masala. Nine hours later I woke up sweating, throwing up and, eventually, losing consciousness on the floor. It was the time that I threw up after losing consciousness when both Elisa and I decided a visit to the Emergency Room was in order. They filled me with four (4) bags of fluid to get my heart rate down.

On my birthday, two nights ago, Elisa and I saw a marvelous play: Ted Hughes’ Tales from Ovid by the Whistler in the Dark theater company. The actors depended from aerial silks and assumed perfect godlike and falling-human-like poses as they chorused some of Ovid’s richest stuff (Procne and Tereus, Myrrha and Cinyras). The silks were sails and threads and beds and air currents and seas and sheets. Unique for Theater in Boston there wasn’t a hint of the amateur. This was a stirring, rolling full-throated and full-bodied production, and I’ll be following Whistler in the Dark.