Sense of Smell

On the way back from the grocery store, there is a brown dog with the bluest blue eyes Windy has ever seen on a dog tied to the bike rack. Naturally, she stops, bends down. Dog smells her hand and decides she is good. She decides the dog is good too, as she does the same thing with people but wouldn’t know how to tell a dog by its smell. It’s all the same to her and dogs are too much work anyway.

That happens on Saturday.

Sunday, a man-boy is wearing a shirt that does not smell like him, which Windy notices almost immediately. The man-boy is sitting in front of a desk, Windy stands in front of him and he takes both her hands like they are going to dance.

Windy, animal-like, sniffs his hands. They smell sweet and also like tobacco.

it all adds up

1.

She is always leaning
forward just a bit.

I knew her in that way first.

She is maybe falling or looking around a corner.

She says, “I was a savage when I was younger

Now I don’t eat meat.”

either way
It’s all the same to me.

the same way I feel after dreams about flying

In the dream, I limp all the way to Chicago on an ankle the size of a tennis ball.

(I want to say “grapefruit,” because it is juicy and sticky when split open, but that would give the impression that the ailment, which followed me into my sleep, was much more serious. When I wake the antibiotics will already have begun to work. The infection begins to look like a large bruise on my calf, more closely related to accidents with baseball bats than aggravated stings from yellow jackets.)

By the time I reach Chicago, my right ankle is having sympathy pains. My body parts, they like to console each other. I think I am meant to walk farther, over the heaving, tired big-shouldered hog butcher of a city but it is snowing on the East Coast. But I don’t want to walk anymore and, in the dream, it is snowing. It is snowing hard and somewhere in a city park, the Cloud Gate has frozen over and the city is stacking flakes instead of wheat.

Somewhere, I heard dreaming of snow means love but I hate the cold. The cold and wet together.

The woman I love whom I know who lives in this city is in Luxembourg. That is too far to walk.

So, I follow some hipsters to an overpriced tea shoppe. The floor tilts towards the street as if the men in the shop do not want customers to sit and stay and enjoy tea in a personal and civilized way. Even more, there is only one table in the entire large shop with woods floors. The table even encourages people to avoid sitting because, in spite of being surrounded by six chairs, it is piled high with gift baskets wrapped in crinkling green cellophane that would really make an awful present. It is like the first Starbucks in Pike Place Market where there is only standing room and the people there still think there is an “x” in “espresso.” There is no “x” in “espresso,” but there is one in “exit.” And that is what is encouraged in both places.

The men working in there do not like us. We play a game with tea leaves and the shop-men steal things out of my suitcase when I start to win; they think I cannot see them. I can in fact see them.

Later, I say, “I can’t find my David Foster Wallace.” I mean an anthology of his.

One of the men playing the leaf game says, “David Foster Wallace is dead.”

I want to say, “I don’t believe you,”

New companion blog!

Sometimes I talk to interesting people, sometimes I write about it. Conversations is my new, slightly more journalistic flavored blog.

Assembling North America

This body wants to be a temple. So,
today:
religious conflict is to say,
“Do not deify California.”

Church women want gods while
I want
my $9.50 an hour salary on Sunday mornings.
I want a warm body.
Human things.

(the poet, she
wants California to be
the right hip-bone of North America. This is
a more intimate place than the curling feet of Central America;
there lies yeyo like road dust.
Please.
Wash your feet before you come to bed.)

North America has a broad chest
and the loggers have been shaving, man-land-scaping, all the ancient chest hairs away
to be discarded in the great Pacific bathtub.

While extracting black from the depths
of human earth, your oily pores,
you discover your resources are finite.
So, you will use all of them.

And I want a piece too,
the sinewy hib-bone valleys of California,
but (so does everyone else)

I am asking myself if I can
spend a life on a single continent.

June on the west coast, pt. III

A stitch in time saves nine.
June 23rd, 2009

Tuesday. The barista asks your name and how old you were on your last birthday. The second question is not entirely out of place; he likes the broach you’re wearing and you tell him it was a birthday gift. He asks if your birthday is soon.

Yes. You tell him it was yesterday.

Well, happy belated birthday.

On your most recent birthday, you were 9teen. Some synesthetes* associate numbers with personality (You have never liked the number 4. She isn’t trust worthy). 9 is slouching and self-conscious. You write it down and it either hunches or leans backward awkwardly. It is either toppling over or falling into itself. 9 always looks uncomfortable. Over sixty types of synesthesia have been recorded but the neuroscientists cannot tell you why 9 is so very awkward. 9’s eyes are cast downward; he is not telling you something.

You think of the time when you went the first week or so of knowing a person before he asked your age. You were 18, which is twice 9 and perhaps twice the awkward. He wanted to take you out for a drink. Well, you said-

He was surprised. He wasn’t entirely displeased.

You also remember being 9 years old. Ten years ago you were sitting in the backyard during a hot Texas summer. You baptized your dog in the swimming pool. She sneezed. You felt guilty. The dog was afraid of water. She was black and shaped like a barrel with short triangle ears and golden eyes that made your uncles uncomfortable. Your ninth birthday party took place in that same pool where you saved the soul of an animal. Nine was, generally, waterlogged.

June on the west coast, pt. II

Coming Up.
As we speak,
a ukulele is being played several floors below,
gets me excited.

I imagine
you just spent ten minutes taking off your jacket.
“I am coming up.”

“What does that mean?”

“Cheerleader, I fly into Seattle Sunday.”
(I have your ticket. They spelled your name wrong.)
“How’s that?”

.
.

(this poem is a testament to how great my friends are. The words in this are just texts I’ve received, re-arranged.)