conditions uncertain

tried to fight the creeping sense of dread with temporal things, most of the time I guess I felt alright

2010-11-11T09:10:00.003-05:00

Brooklyn, New York

The Mountain Goats, "The Mess Inside"

Have you lost your faith, have you lost your way, have you lost everything you thought you held yesterday?

2010-06-15T19:55:00.003-05:00

Do Good, Lion's Club Flea-Market, Dublin, Virginia, 2010

the photo is just an excuse to post some old-school soothing Smog (Bill Callahan), "To Be Of Use" from Red Apple Falls

I wish I was in heaven sittin down, I wish the road we were taking wasn't made for breaking down

2010-05-27T10:42:00.007-05:00

Motel Wolves, Cherokee, North Carolina

If you're a fan of loose, rambling country rock, Phosphorescent's new album Here's To Taking It Easy is well worth checking out. Along with Bill Callahan's Rough Travel for a Rare Thing, it's been my daily soundtrack lately. "Wolves" is from their previous album, Pride.

I still never win, but I'd love to try it

2010-05-24T20:20:00.000-05:00

White-tailed Deer Throw, Cherokee, North Carolina

On a day that threatens that the earth might open up, the birds have stopped their singing, the insects have shut up.

2010-05-23T16:23:00.006-05:00

Repent, Cleveland, Tennessee

~from Flannery O'Connor's "Parker's Back"

As he circled the field his mind was on a suitable design for his back. The sun, the size of a golf ball, began to switch regularly from in front to behind him, but he appeared to see it in both places as if he had eyes in the back of his head. All at once he saw the tree reaching out to grasp him. A ferocious thud propelled him into the air, and he heard himself yelling in an unbievably loud voice, "GOD ABOVE!"

He landed on his back while the tractor crashed upside down into a tree and burst into flame. The first thing Parker saw were his shoes, quickly being eaten by the fire; one was caught under the tractor, the other was some distance away, burning by itself. He was not in them. He could feel the hot breath of the burning tree on his face. He scrambled backwards, still sitting, his eyes cavernous, and if had known how to cross himself he would have done it.

His truck was on a dirt road at the edge of the field. He moved toward it, still sitting, still backwards, but faster and faster; halfway he got up and began a kind of forward-bent run from which he collapsed on his knees twice. His legs felt like two old rusted rain gutters. He reached the truck finally and took off in it, zigzagging up the road. He drove past his house on the embankment and straight for the city, fifty miles distant.

Parker did not allow himself to think on the way to the city. He only knew that there had been a great change in his life, a leap forward into a worse unknown, and that there was nothing he could do about it.

sometimes father you and I are like dirty ghosts who wear the same sheets every day, as one more piece of us just dies and dies and dies

2010-05-21T11:01:00.006-05:00

Big Chief and Harrah's Casino, Cherokee, North Carolina

Final scene from Werner Herzog's Stroszek

with some ballet moves I removed her shoes, and painted my lips to hers, but still she said "I can't believe you own this attitude."

2010-05-06T08:46:00.004-05:00

Dance Academy, Erwin, TN

Questions About Angels
~Billy Collins

Of all the questions you might want to ask
about angels, the only one you ever hear
is how many can dance on the head of a pin.

No curiosity about how they pass the eternal time
besides circling the Throne chanting in Latin
or delivering a crust of bread to a hermit on earth
or guiding a boy and girl across a rickety wooden bridge.

Do they fly through God's body and come out singing?
Do they swing like children from the hinges
of the spirit world saying their names backwards and forwards?
Do they sit alone in little gardens changing colors?

What about their sleeping habits, the fabric of their robes,
their diet of unfiltered divine light?
What goes on inside their luminous heads? Is there a wall
these tall presences can look over and see hell?

If an angel fell off a cloud, would he leave a hole
in a river and would the hole float along endlessly
filled with the silent letters of every angelic word?

If an angel delivered the mail, would he arrive
in a blinding rush of wings or would he just assume
the appearance of the regular mailman and
whistle up the driveway reading the postcards?

No, the medieval theologians control the court.
The only question you ever hear is about
the little dance floor on the head of a pin
where halos are meant to converge and drift invisibly.

It is designed to make us think in millions,
billions, to make us run out of numbers and collapse
into infinity, but perhaps the answer is simply one:
one female angel dancing alone in her stocking feet,
a small jazz combo working in the background.

She sways like a branch in the wind, her beautiful
eyes closed, and the tall thin bassist leans over
to glance at his watch because she has been dancing
forever, and now it is very late, even for musicians.

Isadora Duncan
~Vic Chesnutt

once I dreamed I was dancing with Isadora Duncan
in a silver cafe,
it was a cafe that was not at all near here
she was planning to diversify
and she sang I should do the same
so I whistled to her how I loved her the best

but she sang "I can't believe you own this attitude",
but with some ballet moves,
I removed her shoes
and I painted my lips to hers
and still she sang "I can't believe you own this attitude"
she sang "I can't believe you own this, this attitude"

she needed her beauty sleep
though I didn't want it to sound like that
her mind was occupied,
her hard coffee was cold by then as snow

and she sang "my smile is more than pearly white,
and my dreams are more than you",
she sang "my yellow eyes are more than mirrors,
and my scarf is more, more, more than blue."

and she sang "I can't believe you own this attitude"
yes i sang "I can't believe you own this, this attitude"

she closed her New Directions paperbook
and screamed "there is no shelter in the arts"
she'd been crying all day
but now her eyes they were brighter than the moon

and she sang "my smile is more than pearly white,
and my dreams are more than you",
she sang "my yellow eyes are more than mirrors,
and my scarf is more, more, more, more than blue."

and she sang "I can't believe you own this attitude"
"I can't believe it, I can't believe you own this attitude",
"I can't believe it, I can't believe you own this, this attitude".

I'd be riding horses if they let me

2010-04-29T14:56:00.001-05:00

Some photos from the 2009 Virginia High-School Rodeo, Dublin, Virgina

I've been going through some old stuff recently...I don't think I've posted these before.

Will Oldham (Palace), Horses

Once again in the world of 1,200 feelings

2010-04-28T17:24:00.002-05:00

Hoop Dreams, Northfork, West Virginia

Defending Walt Whitman
--Sherman Alexie

Basketball is like this for young Indian boys, all arms and legs
and serious stomach muscles. Every body is brown!
These are the twentieth-century warriors who will never kill,
although a few sat quietly in the deserts of Kuwait,
waiting for orders to do something, to do something.

God, there is nothing as beautiful as a jumpshot
on a reservation summer basketball court
where the ball is moist with sweat,
and makes a sound when it swishes through the net
that causes Walt Whitman to weep because it is so perfect.

There are veterans of foreign wars here
although their bodies are still dominated
by collarbones and knees, although their bodies still respond
in the ways that bodies are supposed to respond when we are young.
Every body is brown! Look there, that boy can run
up and down this court forever. He can leap for a rebound
with his back arched like a salmon, all meat and bone
synchronized, magnetic, as if the court were a river,
as if the rim were a dam, as if the air were a ladder
leading the Indian boy toward home.

Some of the Indian boys still wear their military hair cuts
while a few have let their hair grow back.
It will never be the same as it was before!
One Indian boy has never cut his hair, not once, and he braids it
into wild patterns that do not measure anything.
He is just a boy with too much time on his hands.
Look at him. He wants to play this game in bare feet.

God, the sun is so bright! There is no place like this.
Walt Whitman stretches his calf muscles
on the sidelines. He has the next game.
His huge beard is ridiculous on the reservation.
Some body throws a crazy pass and Walt Whitman catches it
with quick hands. He brings the ball close to his nose
and breathes in all of its smells: leather, brown skin, sweat,
black hair, burning oil, twisted ankle, long drink of warm water,
gunpowder, pine tree. Walt Whitman squeezes the ball tightly.
He wants to run. He hardly has the patience to wait for his turn.
"What's the score?" he asks. He asks, "What's the score?"

Basketball is like this for Walt Whitman. He watches these Indian boys
as if they were the last bodies on earth. Every body is brown!
Walt Whitman shakes because he believes in God.
Walt Whitman dreams of the Indian boy who will defend him,
trapping him in the corner, all flailing arms and legs
and legendary stomach muscles. Walt Whitman shakes
because he believes in God. Walt Whitman dreams
of the first jumpshot he will take, the ball arcing clumsily
from his fingers, striking the rim so hard that it sparks.
Walt Whitman shakes because he believes in God.
Walt Whitman closes his eyes. He is a small man and his beard
is ludicrous on the reservation, absolutely insane.
His beard makes the Indian boys righteously laugh. His beard
frightens the smallest Indian boys. His beard tickles the skin
of the Indian boys who dribble past him. His beard, his beard!

God, there is beauty in every body. Walt Whitman stands
at center court while the Indian boys run from basket to basket.
Walt Whitman cannot tell the difference between
offense and defense. He does not care if he touches the ball.
Half of the Indian boys wear t-shirts damp with sweat
and the other half are bareback, skin slick and shiny.
There is no place like this. Walt Whitman smiles.
Walt Whitman shakes. This game belongs to him.

You've been sittin' on your ass, tryin' to find some grace

2010-04-04T09:57:00.003-05:00

Flowers in Car Window, Dublin, Virginia

--wanted something from Chris Bell's I am the Cosmos, but there's not much on youtube. So...

It may be crazy, but I'm the closest thing I have to a voice of reason

2010-03-30T15:54:00.007-05:00

Untitled, near Asheville, NC

Gil Scott-Heron covering Smog's "I'm New Here"

the only tune I hear is the sound of the wind, as it blows through the town

2010-03-27T21:00:00.008-05:00

Graham's Forge, Virginia

The Red Clay Ramblers "Aragon Mill"

Follow the ocean line, follow the flow, and give me a little time to take what I know

2010-03-26T10:10:00.009-05:00

Ocean Bay Seafood, Wytheville, VA

--a sentence from Marc Richard's "Happiness of the Garden Variety" (in The Ice At the Bottom of the World)

…one thing about Vic, and I say this to show how Steve Willis and I made all this worse, was that Vic not reading or writing seemed to make him not to think about things like they had names that he had to remember by of thinking that needed spelling, but instead Vic seemed to think about things in groups, like here is a group of things that are my humans, here is a group of things that are my animals, here is a group of things I got for free, here is a group of things I got off good deal making, and here is a group of things I should keep a long time because I got them from some people who had kept them a long time, and maybe because of another couple reasons put together, Vic had another group of things painted aquamarine blue because he had gotten a good deal on two fifty-five-gallon barrels of aquamarine blue paint, and everything—even Vic’s humans and animals who could not help but rub against or sit in somewhere because it was everywhere wet—everything was touched the color of aquamarine, though all of us calling it ackerine, because even spelling it out and sounding it out to Vic it still came out of his mouth that way, ackerine, keeping in mind here is a man who can’t read nor write, and Steve Willis and I saying it ackerine like Vic said it, for fun, because it also always seemed like somehow we were always holding a brush of it somewhere putting it on something in change for rent.

All my heroes are in the great beyond, England is old but Atlantis is gone

2010-03-25T08:29:00.005-05:00

Artificial Flowers, Gadsden, Alabama

One of the Butterflies
~W.S. Merwin

The trouble with pleasure is the timing
it can overtake me without warning
and be gone before I know it is here
it can stand facing me unrecognized
while I am remembering somewhere else
in another age or someone not seen
for years and never to be seen again
in this world and it seems that I cherish
only now a joy I was not aware of
when it was here although it remains
out of reach and will not be caught or named
or called back and if I could make it stay
as I want to it would turn to pain.

Gravity
~Louis Jenkins

It turns out that the drain pipe from the sink is attached to
nothing and water just runs right onto the ground in the
crawl space underneath the house and then trickles out
into the stream that passes through the backyard. It turns
out that the house is not really attached to the ground but
sits atop a few loose concrete blocks all held in place by
gravity, which, as I understand it, means "seriousness." Well,
this is serious enough. If you look into it further you will
discover that the water is not attached to anything either
and that perhaps the rocks and the trees are not all that
firmly in place. The world is a stage. But don't try to move
anything. You might hurt yourself, besides that's a job for
the stagehands and union rules are strict. You are merely a
player about to deliver a soliloquy on the septic system to a
couple dozen popple trees and a patch of pale blue sky.

They got a name for the winners in the world, I want a name when I lose

2010-03-23T14:33:00.004-05:00

First and Commerce, Bluefield, WV

History of Desire
~Tony Hoagland

When you're seventeen, and drunk
on the husky, late-night flavor
of your first girlfriend's voice
along the wires of the telephone

what else to do but steal
your father's El Dorado from the drive,
and cruise out to the park on Driscoll Hill?
Then climb the county water tower

and aerosol her name in spraycan orange
a hundred feet above the town?
Because only the letters of that word,
DORIS, next door to yours,

in yard-high, iridescent script,
are amplified enough to tell the world
who's playing lead guitar
in the rock band of your blood.

You don't consider for a moment
the shock in store for you in 10 A.D.,
a decade after Doris, when,
out for a drive on your visit home,

you take the Smallville Road, look up
and see RON LOVES DORIS
still scorched upon the reservoir.
This is how history catches up—

by holding still until you
bump into yourself.
What makes you blush, and shove
the pedal of the Mustang

almost through the floor
as if you wanted to spray gravel
across the features of the past,
or accelerate into oblivion?

Are you so out of love that you
can't move fast enough away?
But if desire is acceleration,
experience is circular as any

Indianapolis. We keep coming back
to what we are—each time older,
more freaked out, or less afraid.
And you are older now.

You should stop today.
In the name of Doris, stop.

Falling and Flying
~Jack Gilbert

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It's the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.

All words aside, take care

2010-03-19T09:41:00.010-05:00

Untitled, Princeton, WV

RIP Alex Chilton (1950-2010)

Big Star (Alex Chilton)-"Thank You Friends"

Paul Westerberg (The Replacements)-"Alex Chilton"

Stupid man, hitchhiking out of the good life, he says "Catch you when..."

2010-03-16T17:45:00.006-05:00

Wheby's Van, Princeton, WV

Rolling Stones (Keith Richards) "Coming Down Again"

All that profit taking was a beautiful awakening.

2010-03-14T10:21:00.006-05:00

Flag in Window, Bluefield, WV

America
~Robert Creeley

America, you ode for reality!
Give back the people you took.

Let the sun shine again
on the four corners of the world

you thought of first but do not
own, or keep like a convenience.

People are your own word, you
invented that locus and term.

Here, you said and say, is
where we are. Give back

what we are, these people you made,
us, and nowhere but you to be.

A Supermarket in California
~Allen Ginsberg

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for
I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache
self-conscious looking at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went
into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families
shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the
avocados, babies in the tomatoes!--and you, Garcia Lorca, what
were you doing down by the watermelons?

I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber,
poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery
boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the
pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans
following you, and followed in my imagination by the store
detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in our
solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen
delicacy, and never passing the cashier.

Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in
an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the
supermarket and feel absurd.)
Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The
trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be
lonely.

Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love
past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher,
what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and
you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat
disappear on the black waters of Lethe?

What do you do with your pragmatic passions, with your classically neurotic style?

2010-03-12T14:10:00.005-05:00

Jiffy Lube, Princeton, WV

Of Memory and Distance
~Russell Edson

It’s a scientific fact that anyone entering the distance will grow smaller. Eventually becoming so small he might only be found with a telescope, or, for more intimacy, with a microscope…

But there’s a vanishing point, where anyone having penetrated the distance must disappear entirely without hope of his ever returning, leaving only a memory of his ever having been.

But then there is fiction, so that one is never really sure if it was someone who vanished into the end of seeing, or someone made of paper and ink…

Antimatter
~Russell Edson
On the other side of a mirror there’s an inverse world, where the insane go sane; where bones climb out of the earth and recede to the first slime of love.

And in the evening the sun is just rising.

Lovers cry because they are a day younger, and soon childhood robs them of their pleasure.

In such a world there is much sadness which, of course, is joy . . .

'Cause we've got our recruits, and our green mohair suits, so please leave your i.d. at the door.

2010-03-11T10:36:00.006-05:00

$3, $7, $5, Bluefield, WV

Weariness of Men
~Frank Stanford

My grandmother said when she was young
The grass was so wild and high
You couldn’t see a man on horseback.

In the fields she made out
Three barns,
Dark and blown down from the weather
Like her husbands.

She remembers them in the dark,
Cursing the beasts,
And how they would leave the bed
In the morning,
The dead grass of their eyes
Stacked against her.

Riverlight
~Frank Stanford

My father and I lie down together.
He is dead.

We look up at the stars, the steady sound
Of the wind turning the night like a ceiling fan.
This is our home.

I remember the work in him
Like bitterness in persimmons before a frost.
And I imagine the way he had fear,
The ground turning dark in a rain.

Now he gets up.

And I dream he looks down in my eyes
And watches me die.

The Intruder
~Frank Stanford

after Jean Follain

In the evenings they listen to the same
tunes nobody could call happy
somebody turns up at the edge of town
the roses bloom
and an old dinner bell rings once more
under the thunder clouds
In front of the porch posts of the store
a man seated on a soda water case
turns around and spits and says
to everybody
in his new set of clothes
holding up his hands
as long as I live nobody
touches my dogs my friends

The scientists say it will all wash away, but we don't believe anymore.

2010-03-10T10:33:00.003-05:00

Iron Ore, Foster Falls, Virginia

Henry Flynt--Hillbilly Tape Music

If you're tired and you're sick of the city, remember it's just a flower made out of clay

2010-03-09T10:58:00.009-05:00

White Doors, Princeton, WV

Belly
~David Brooks

This belly is not mine,
not the one I imagined
when I was younger and thought
about how it would be
when I got married.
This belly is a rude intrusion
into those dreams, it bumps
into my wife, who also differs
from that golden vision.
She is grander in ways
I never suspected: like my house,
she is bolder and kinder in dimension:
I used to think I would marry
a blonde and live in a shack,
both of us perpetually, pathetically thin.
I push my belly up against my wife
and admire the warmth of the
afternoon soaking into it.
The sun shines in on us
the way I like it, the sun is
the way I always thought
the sun should be.

Sometimes days go speeding past, sometimes this one seems like the last

2010-03-08T18:16:00.009-05:00

Plastic Roses and Snow, Bluefield, WV

Merle Haggard "Roses in Winter"

We are around near the railroad tracks, checking out the thunderings

2010-03-07T18:22:00.012-05:00

Boxcar, Pulaski, VA

After a long hiatus from taking photos, I walked around Pulaski today with my D50. It was hard to shake the scales from my eyes, I guess...I didn't get many good shots, but I was plenty happy just to soak in the sun and warmth. Tomorrow--Bluefield, WV. Hope the weather holds.

Since my last post, I've added links to my inspirations list. Tom Pallante, Jim Knipe, Bill Ratcliffe, and Melissa Stallard have all taught photography at Radford University at one point or another, and--more importantly--they're all wonderful photographers. Do yourself a favor and check them out.

the last word is the lost word

2010-01-22T10:27:00.007-05:00

Tom Skeens' Television, Appalachia, Virginia

~2 poems by Wendell Berry

A Warning to My Readers

Do not think me gentle
because I speak in praise
of gentleness, or elegant
because I honor the grace
that keeps this world. I am
a man crude as any,
gross of speech, intolerant,
stubborn, angry, full
of fits and furies. That I
may have spoken well
at times, is not natural.
A wonder is what it is.

XI

Though he was ill and in pain,
in disobedience to the instruction he
would have received if he had asked,
the old man got up from his bed,
dressed, and went to the barn.
The bare branches of winter had emerged
through the last leaf-colors of fall,
the loveliest of all, browns and yellows
delicate and nameless in the gray light
and the sifting rain. He put feed
in the troughs for eighteen ewe lambs,
sent the dog for them, and she
brought them. They came eager
to their feed, and he who felt
their hunger was by their feeding
eased. From no place in the time
of present places, within no boundary
nameable in human thought,
they had gathered once again,
the shepherd, his sheep, and his dog
with all the known and the unknown
round about to the heavens' limit.
Was this his stubbornness or bravado?
No. Only an ordinary act
of profoundest intimacy in a day
that might have been better. Still
the world persisted in its beauty,
he in his gratitude, and for this
he had most earnestly prayed.

Lord, I ain't gon' stop walkin' 'til I get in sweet mama's do'

2010-01-19T16:44:00.004-05:00

Church Window, Appalachia, Virginia

We all know what we know, it's a hard swath to mow

2010-01-15T11:01:00.005-05:00

Star Video, Big Stone Gap, Virginia

No Direction Home
~Charles Wright

After a certain age, there's no one left to turn to.
You've got to find Eurydice on your own,
you've got
to find the small crack
between here and everywhere else all by yourself.

How could it be otherwise?
Everyone's gone away, the houses are all empty,
and overcast starts to fill the sky like soiled insulation.

Now Close the Windows
~Robert Frost

Now close the windows and hush all the fields;
If the trees must, let them silently toss;
No bird is singing now, and if there is,
Be it my loss.

It will be long ere the marshes resume,
It will be long ere the earliest bird:
So close the windows and not hear the wind,
But see all wind-stirred.

Not Signs
~Susan Ludvigson

I drive toward distant clouds and my mother's dying.
The quickened sky is mercury, it slithers
across the horizon. Against that liquid silence,
a V of birds crosses-sudden and silver.

They tilt, becoming white light as they turn, glitter
like shooting stars arcing slow motion out of the abyss,
not falling.
Now they look like chips of flint,
the arrow broken.
I think, This isn't myth-

they are not signs, not souls.

Reaching blue
again, they're ordinary ducks or maybe
Canada geese. Veering away they shoot
into the west, too far for my eyes, aching

as they do.

Never mind what I said
before. Those birds took my breath. I knew what it meant.

2010-01-14T19:48:00.010-05:00

Pulaski, Virginia

John Glenn drinks cocktails with God in a cafe in downtown Saigon

2010-01-11T19:41:00.007-05:00

--I stole this balloon on icicle idea from William Lamson. Two fishermen walked up from the mostly frozen creek below and gave me some confused looks as I posed and photographed the balloons. It was a lot of fun.

Mekons

Children are singing, truths they are winging, freedom is ringing all over the world

2010-01-04T11:24:00.006-05:00

Untitled, Pulaski, Virginia

Beck + friends (Wilco, Leslie Feist, others) covering "Little Hands," from Skip Spence's Oar. Go to Beck's website to check out other songs from the album, including an excellent cover of "Broken Heart," with Jeff Tweedy handling lead vocals.

Record Club is an informal meeting of various musicians to record an album in a day. The album chosen to be reinterpreted is used as a framework. Nothing is rehearsed or arranged ahead of time. A track is put up here once a week. As you will hear, some of the songs are rough renditions, often first takes that document what happened over the course of a day as opposed to a polished rendering. There is no intention to 'add to' the original work or attempt to recreate the power of the original recording. Only to play music and document what happens. And those who aren't familiar with the albums in question will hopefully look for the songs in their definitive versions.--Beck

Motorboating through our lives, only gradually gaining rudimentary navigational skills

2009-12-28T12:41:00.007-05:00

Untitled, Pulaski, Virginia

RIP VIC Chesnutt

Chesnutt on NPR's Tiny Desk Concerts

Singer Kristin Hersch, a close friend of Vic's, set up this page to remember him and collect money for his family to cover the cost of medical bills, funeral, etc.

Some of Vic's friends (from the Constellation Records website):

"The most important story to report now is not Vic’s death but a life and work overflowing with insight, humor, and yes, resilience. This, after all, was the man who wrote:'I thought I had a calling, anyway, I just kept dialing.' Sixteen extraordinary albums, five in the last couple of years; countless live shows so powerful and sublime they deeply altered the lives of those on the stage with Vic and those looking up, yes up, at him...Vic’s death, just so you all know, did not come at the end of some cliché downward spiral. He was battling deep depression but also at the peak of his powers, and with the help of friends and family he was in the middle of a desperate search for help. The system failed to provide it. I miss him terribly."

Jem Cohen-filmmaker/photographer/North Star Deserter producer

“We have lost one of our great ones. His songs and his story remain.”

Michael Stipe

"'I flew around a little room once.' A line from Supernatural.
He was just that. He possessed an unearthly energy and
yet was humanistic with the common man in mind. He was
entirely present and entirely somewhere else. A mystical
somewhere else. A child and an old guy as he called himself.
Before he made an album he said he was a bum. Now he
is in flight bumming round beyond the little room. With his
angel voice."

Patti Smith

"in 1991 i moved to athens georgia in search of god, but what I discovered instead was vic chesnutt. hearing his music completely transformed the way i thought about writing songs, and i will forever be in his debt."

Jeff Mangum
Neutral Milk Hotel

"Years ago upon discovery, West of Rome consoled me when I was going under. A life saver with the straight story. I followed since then from a distance. Vic was a unique being, mind, voice. No one spoke or made music like that, with that particular timbre, vocabulary and perception. Fierce and direct or levitated, whimsical and ornamental, he always cut to the bone. And past that, to the soul. Its a shame. A national tragedy, when you look at the issues being faced."

Mark McElhattan
Film curator, New York Film Festival

~3 Chesnutt songs

Bakersfield

the souvenirs
on my dusty shelf
I get out the Tarn-X,
and I polish them myself
yes, posters are falling,
but who needs them at my age?
I've learned to smile,
when all I feel is rage

so I think I will go to Bakersfield
with Gabriel and Paul
and I will hide behind the garbage cans
while the holy platitudes fall
and blow the gates,
I am coming through
with my albatrosses and all

and it's strategy not protocol
yes, it's strategy, not protocol,
that brings me here.

Lucinda Williams

imports and altercations
my faculties on a shoe-string vacation
I settle down on a hurt as big as Robert Mitchum
and listen to Lucinda Williams

oh, convenient lies, rubber knives
I'm a dastardly villain, doing belly dives
I before E except after me
I'm dowsing my vitals at break-neck speed

you and your little entourage
playing amazing little parlor games in the garage
like a jury of my peers triangulating
my pretty point of exasperation
yes we gather for some of that Catholic juice
and hide behind the shower curtain, i watch the virgin spruce
I'm soaking wet and feeling funny
the mirror's a mirage, no wonder I always look so crummy

my heroes are all off in the great beyond
England is old but Atlantis is gone
feathers are floating down, and I can't dodge them
the tar is oozing from my little noggin
it's ugly ancient residue
there ain't no mistaking what's been abused

feathers are floating down and I can't dodge them
the tar is oozing from my little noggin
it's ugly ancient residue
there ain't no mistaking who's been accused

Gluefoot

cross my heart and cross my eyes
stick a needle in my thigh
drop kick my unscrewed lid
and fiddle fiddle fiddle fiddle fiddle with what's inside

a rusty mass of mechinations
still i'm vying for the right vaccination

I make a masterful selection like louis pasteur
certain i've found at least a temporary cure
if there's one thing i've learned in this chemical world
it's very very very very very little is pure

my gluefoot sticks, i wrestle with it
I try to skedaddle but my gluefoot is fixed

if they'd give me a shovel in this communication age
maybe i'd have kept my mouth shut and done something today
I want to blame democracy and it's inherent lies
I want to blame my heritage for my leisurely demise

everybody wants to wear the cleats
everbody wants to be Dominique
I want to be someone separate from me
I want to have a sustained feeling

my gluefoot sticks, i wrestle with it
I try to skidaddle but my gluefoot is fixed

Time will break the world

2009-12-13T17:55:00.004-05:00

Time-Warner, Brooklyn, NY

We've been reading Sherman Alexie's The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven in the American Lit. class I teach. Here's a poem of his I shared with the class a few days ago.

Mystery Train
~Sherman Alexie

I boarded the Amtrak in Portland on my way
To Seattle and searched for an empty seat—
Hopefully an empty row. In Coach Car C,
I saw a seat next to a teen. The train swayed

As I approached him and asked, "Can I sit here?"
He wouldn’t look at me. His face was blank.
Asberger’s, I thought. "I must warn you I’m weird,"
The kid said. "I’m weird, too," I said and thanked

Him for his kindness. I worried he would talk
Too much, and he did, but he was charming and rude.
He said, "You’ve got a big head and face, dude."
He said, "I like rap music more than I like rock

Because I like blacks more than whites,
Especially when I play the royal game, chess."
With Asberger’s, I knew the kid might obsess
Over certain objects or ideas, like

The boy I know who collects Matchbox cars
And recites the manufacturing history
Of thousands of them. "It’s not too far,"
The Train Kid said, "We are on a train journey,

But I take it twice a month, on weekends.
I’m sorry I’m weird. I don’t have many friends.
My mother and father love me, but they
Got divorced when I was ten. You could say

They hate each other as much they love me."
He told me his father lived in Portland
And his mother in Seattle. "It’s kind of fun
To ride the train," he said. "I like to see

The landscape out the window. Pretty soon,
There will be a yellow truck parked outside
A blue and red house." Of course, he was right.
As we traveled north, the kid always knew

What was coming next. I asked, "What’s your name?"
He ignored me and said, "There used to be
A dog that lived in that junkyard. It’s a shame,
But I think he’s dead now." Then he looked at me,

Made eye contact for the first time, and said,
"In seven years, I have taken this trip
One hundred and nine times. I have only missed
Two trains because I had the flu in my head."

Jesus, the kid had become a nomad
Riding rails through the ruins of a marriage,
And, at first, I was eager to disparage
His parents, but then I realized that

His folks must love him as obsessively
As he loves them. They put him on the train
Because they need to see him. It was lovely
And strange. I wanted to ask this kid about pain

And what that word meant to him. I guessed
He could teach me a new vocabulary—
I was vain and wanted to be blessed—
But then he asked, "Are you old and married?"

"Yes," I said. "I’ve been married for ten years."
He nodded his head and looked out the window
At the sunlight flashing between tree rows,
Then whispered, "I have cried a lot of tears."

I was breathless. Stunned. I wanted to take
The kid into my arms, but I knew he’d hate
The contact, so I could only smile
When the kid said, "In a little while,

We are going to see the Mima Mounds."
And there were thousands of those things, six
To eight feet tall, dotting the South Sound.
Created with gravel, rocks, dirt, and sticks,

Those mounds escape explanation. They’re not
Indian burial sites. They’re not homes
For gophers or insects. They don’t contain bones
Or fossils or UFOs. They’re just odd

Geologic formations that will keep
Their secrets no matter how hard we try
To reveal them. When our train arrived
In Seattle, the kid walked beside me—

I had quickly become a habit, I guess—
Until he saw his Mom, short and pretty,
And pulled her tightly against his chest.
He said something to her, pointed at me,

And she smiled and waved. I walked home,
Chanted the first lines of this poem,
And committed them to memory.
And if a few strangers thought me crazy

For writing poetry, aloud, in public,
Like another homeless schizophrenic,

Then fuck them for wanting clarity
And fuck them for fearing mystery.

I'm afraid I got more in common with who I was than who I am becoming

2009-12-10T12:53:00.004-05:00

Plymouth, Pulaski, Virginia

Godzilla in Mexico
~Roberto Bolano

Listen carefully, my son: bombs were falling
over Mexico City
but no one even noticed.
The air carried poison through
the streets and open windows.
You'd just finished eating and were watching
cartoons on TV.
I was reading in the bedroom next door
when I realized we were going to die.
Despite the dizziness and nausea I dragged myself
to the kitchen and found you on the floor.
We hugged. You asked what was happening
and I didn’t tell you we were on death’s program
but instead that we were going on a journey,
one more, together, and that you shouldn’t be afraid.
When it left, death didn’t even
close our eyes.
What are we? you asked a week or year later,
ants, bees, wrong numbers
in the big rotten soup of chance?
We’re human beings, my son, almost birds,
public heroes and secrets.

Self Portrait At Twenty Years
~Roberto Bolano

I set off, I took up the march and never knew
where it might take me. I went full of fear,
my stomach dropped, my head was buzzing:
I think it was the icy wind of the dead.
I don't know. I set off, I thought it was a shame
to leave so soon, but at the same time
I heard that mysterious and convincing call.
You either listen or you don't, and I listened
and almost burst out crying: a terrible sound,
born on the air and in the sea.
A sword and shield. And then,
despite the fear, I set off, I put my cheek
against death's cheek.
And it was impossible to close my eyes and miss seeing
that strange spectacle, slow and strange,
though fixed in such a swift reality:
thousands of guys like me, baby-faced
or bearded, but Latin American, all of us,
brushing cheeks with death.

Now I Understand
~Linda Gregg

Something was pouring out. Filling the field
and making it vacant. A wind blowing them
sideways as they moved forward. The crying
as before. Suddenly I understood why they left
the empty bowls on the table, in the empty hut
overlooking the sea. And knew the meaning
of the heron breaking branches, spreading
his wings in order to rise up out of the dark
woods into the night sky. I understood about
the lovers and the river in January.
Heard the crying out as a battlement,
of greatness, and then the dying began.
The height of passion. Saw the breaking
of the moon and the shattering of the sun.
Believed in the miracle because of the half heard
and the other half seen. How they ranged
and how they fed. Let loose their cries.
One could call it the agony in the garden,
or the paradise, depending on whether
the joy was at the beginning, or after.

The Weight
~Linda Gregg

Two horses were put together in the same paddock.
Night and day. In the night and in the day
wet from heat and the chill of the wind
on it. Muzzle to water, snorting, head swinging
and the taste of bay in the shadowed air.
The dignity of being. They slept that way,
knowing each other always.
Withers quivering for a moment,
fetlock and the proud rise at the base of the tail,
width of back. The volume of them, and each other's weight.
Fences were nothing compared to that.
People were nothing. They slept standing,
their throats curved against the other's rump.
They breathed against each other,
whinnied and stomped.
There are things they did that I do not know.
The privacy of them had a river in it.
Had our universe in it. And the way
its border looks back at us with its light.
This was finally their freedom.
The freedom an oak tree knows.
That is built at night by stars.

If you're unhappy with your silhouette, plenty of dreams on your pillow yet

2009-12-07T10:27:00.009-05:00

Flea-Market, Cana, VA
Burger King Parking Lot, Hillsville, VA
3rd Street, Pulaski, VA

GIANT SAND. WONDER.

It's almost dawn, and the cops are gone, let's all get Dixie Fried!

2009-12-04T13:48:00.006-05:00

Erwin, Tennessee

Carl Perkins "Dixie Fried"

Jim Jarmusch "Mystery Train"

If someone offers you. Some sugar. You should eat it.

2009-11-30T12:08:00.006-05:00

Arthur Russell "A Little Lost"

2009-11-22T16:04:00.009-05:00

To Roanoke with Johnny Cash
~Bob Hicok

Mist became rain became fog was mist
reborn every few miles on a road
made of s and z, of switchback

and falling into mountains of night
would have been easy and who
would have known until flames

and nobody, even then. I played his life
over and over, not so much song
as moan of a needle and the bite,

the hole it eats through the arm
and drove faster to the murmur
of this dead and crow-dressed man,

voice of prison and heroin and the bible
as turned by murdering hands.
And the road was the color of him

and the night was blind but the mist
turned blaze in headlights as I haunted
myself with one of the last songs

he sang, about what else, about pain
and death and regret and the fall
that was the soul of the man.

Johnny Cash "Hurt"

you gonna need a space shuttle or a ladder that's forever

2009-11-22T09:55:00.008-05:00

Rainbow Warrior and Frog, Sylvatus, Virginia

Better get inside the kingdom, and close the door

2009-11-20T13:40:00.010-05:00

Lines on His 30th Birthday
~Everette Maddox

On a hill high above
the mild October day
I stand, heroic, hands
clasped behind my back,
as the last musket's
crack fades
and the smoke drifts away
from the place where the famous
Battle of my Youth was fought.

Who won? Who lost?
Who knows? My speech,
which I seem to have misplaced,
tells. Oh well:
myself and loves and grey
uniform were not among
the casualties, quite; though
a gold button dangles.

Now we'll bind the wounds,
free the slaves, and set up
(oh shrewdly!) a shrine
in the decaying mansion
of my body: post cards,
stuffed possums, and, out back,
whisky to be sold
such emissaries
from the glacial future
as have coin to spend.

One Day Out West
~Ralph Adamo

One day Jeremy woke up from a dream
in which James Dickey, Johnny Cash and Andrew Warhol
had spoken to him in the form of a siren chorus,
gowned and balanced on a ballbearing rock off the coast
of stormy San Francisco where he had been asleep
not more than a few minutes before Harmony
had gripped onto his legs and was about to drag him
down to the center of the earth when

Johnny sang "The earth is two foot deep"
and andy sang "and flat"
and James sang "But love
might put an end to that."

Wow, Jeremy said and he woke up in time to see
Marsha, in her pink robe,
looking out of the window.

It Was the Fifth Circumnavigation
~Ralph Adamo

I try to be a human being.
I've been taught plenty.
A kid with crooked teeth
learns to listen.
I've tried to be a human being.
I've made assignations at wakes.
I've borne the ticks gorged on mere possibility.
I've thought it was later than it was.
If I miss the point
a note is left
explaining it. I fly
higher than it
and through it.
I've seen murders fail to happen
tapping my fingers.
Whatever of mine gets stole gets
brought right back.
In my whole life
I never saw a thief.
Don't ask me about the storms I've slept under.
When I sleep
I need it.
Me and the things that have tried to kill me
we were joking perhaps?
There are women who bring us ancient dreams.
We're fooled.
We think the dreams are ours and begin.

Sweet Mary and Joseph, in a rocket machine, travelling the void, not a star to be seen

2009-11-16T19:43:00.010-05:00

~more wrecked cars...and more Everette Maddox

What I Said To The Sky

I reeled out of a 6-martini
candlelit dinner
& stood in the usual gutter
clutching what was left
of the 20th century
& looked up into a sky
the color of a bruise
It looked like Mr. Hyde
in Classics Illustrated
& I shook my fist
at the God that had vacated years ago
overdue on the moral rent
& said "I came up a romantic idealist
& life has made me a mean
cynical pessimistic piss-ant
fuck you & the clouds you rolled in on"
& some wise-ass passer-by said
"But what about Suzy"
& I said "Suzy
blew the last blast
on my toy trumpet
that's all"

Composed On the Back Of A Dark Green
Muddy Waters Poster

When I woke up on the batture
& you were not only gone
but had never been there
& I heard the aluminum
silence of the river
I was scared--
it wasn't metaphysical
exactly
I just thought they were firing
cannons over the water
to make Huck's carcass rise

A Proposal

The sort of sigh
of light
around the white
nearly full moon
between the telephone
wires
Above the blasted site
of the proposed discount
drugstore
pre-minds me
of the sigh
I expect to expel
if I ever get
to kiss your lovely
mouth

"Several Million Of The
Most Amazing Things I
Ever Saw"

were several million stars
hanging over Highway 43
between Tuscaloosa & Mobile
one winter night
when I was out there
taking a piss

The other 2 most amazing things
were the way your tits
stood up to that flowered dress

Flowing on the Bench

As I was going to sleep
on the iron bench
in the back of the bar
I felt all right
I felt I was joining something
Not the Kiwanis Club
No
I felt like one river joining another
I felt like the Mississippi
flowing into the Ohio
Right where Jim & I
passed Cairo in the fog
Right where the book got good

The moon rose high in the midnight sky, on the road to the bottom land

2009-11-15T20:02:00.008-05:00

~3 by Everette Maddox

Breakfast

Oh hush up
about the
Future: one

morning it
will appear,
right there on

your breakfast
plate, and you’ll
yell “Take it

back,” pounding
the table.
But there won’t

be any
waiters.

Gift

life death eternal significance
bullshit
from now on i’m just
going to make whimsical little gifts
this one is for you
it starts off with bullshit
which is mostly just to get your attention
then trudges along
through some fairly dull
explanatory stuff
and finally comes out (if i’m lucky)
at this point which
is where a little silver cowboy
blows the head off a stuffed tiger
with a pop gun
nobody is really hurt
just me because i know
you won’t accept it

The Sense of Decorum in Poverty

I put on a shirt
with a couple of
gone buttons and a
pair of pants my wife
hates and walk into
the living room and
sit down in a dull
chair. In this way I
acknowledge nothing’s
going on. If I
wanted to really
suffer I could go
lie down in some shit,
but that transgresses
the fine line between
propriety and
masochism. If
I were any kind
of poet I’d go
stick up a Jiffy
Mart or, Say, the First
Bank of the Cosmic
Imagination.
Then I could buy a
red plaid jacket with
a rooster tie and
stumble out into
the clear autumn air
crowing “Guilty! Life,
I’m your beautiful
man.”

I think I know the bloody way by now, Frankie, turn the god-damn radio down, thank you

2009-11-11T22:02:00.003-05:00

current listening (mostly lil wayne, but also this)

I try to act amazed, but it's an act. The movie may be new, but it's the same soundtrack

2009-11-09T10:29:00.006-05:00

Hillsville, Virginia

graham parker "local girls"

There may be mermaids under the wharf, there may even be a man in the moon, ah but Vincent time is running out, I hope you get yourself together soon

2009-11-06T09:58:00.005-05:00

Yoko Ono, Austinsville, VA

a few lines from Charles Simic's notebooks (The Monster Loves His Labyrinth)~

Once again, I find myself on the North Pole. I have no sled, no dogs and I'm dressed for bed. You ask me if I'm cold? Of course I'm cold, you idiots.

I traveled over some bad roads in my childhood. It's no wonder I have a few loose screws.

I remember a small boy saying in the lull between two waves of planes during a bombing raid: "I want to go pipi, Mama."

Riding on a sow, holding on to its ears and shouting, "Out of my way chickens!" Did I really do that?

I like to hear a happy tune played sadly.

The new American Dream is to get to be very rich and still be regarded as a victim.

Did solitary strollers whistle past graveyards in Cotton Mather's time, or were they as silent as the graves?

Old woman stammering excuses to the pigeons for frightening them.

"God has a plan for America," the preacher on TV said just as you came to bed carrying a bowl of cherries against your naked breasts.

At the tanning salon on Route 9, Regina, the Pizza Hut girl, lies naked with shades on.

The magician folded the sheet of paper with my question over and over until no trace of it was left in his hand.

I remember my father saying, "Let's have another bottle of wine so that when we rise from the table we can feel the earth turning under our feet."

It happens that a cricket enters an abandoned house at the end of a road rarely traveled to sing as the night is falling.

A sign in Alabama. Love Power Church. Music and Miracles.

M Ward "Vincent O'Brien"

Once I saw him in the moonlight, when the bats were 'a flying, I saw the werewolf, and the werewolf was crying

2009-10-29T12:43:00.005-05:00

Cave, Austinsville, VA

--a couple videos for Halloween

Scout Niblett & Will Oldham "Kiss"

Cat Power "Werewolf" (Michael Hurley cover)

the last time I felt like this, I was in the wilderness, and the canyon was on fire.

2009-10-22T19:11:00.007-05:00

Interstate-77, Austinsville, Virginia

~2 poems by Larry Levis

In a Country

My love and I are inventing a country, which we
can already see taking shape, as if wheels were
passing through yellow mud. But there is a prob-
lem: if we put a river in the country, it will thaw
and begin flooding. If we put the river on the bor-
der, there will be trouble. If we forget about the
river, there will be no way out. There is already a
sky over that country, waiting for clouds or smoke.
Birds have flown into it, too. Each evening more
trees fill with their eyes, and what they see we can
never erase.

One day it was snowing heavily, and again we were
lying in bed, watching our country: we could
make out the wide river for the first time, blue and
moving. We seemed to be getting closer; we saw
our wheel tracks leading into it and curving out
of sight behind us. It looked like the land we had
left, some smoke in the distance, but I wasn't sure.
There were birds calling. The creaking of our
wheels. And as we entered that country, it felt as if
someone was touching our bare shoulders, lightly,
for the last time.

After the Blue Note Closes

Tonight, holding a stranger in my arms—
Suddenly a downpour, a late
Summer storm. I thought of you, alone or
Not alone in that distant city,
And at that hour when the punk musicians’ bars,
And the carpeted bars,
With their well-coiffed, careful clienteles,
Are closing—
Those strangers pairing off at last & each desiring
What little mercy the other can
Afford. That
Wasted breath of neon light a frail
Tattoo or come on in pools
Of rain. That street. That rain.
No. Our street. Our rain. Holding her, not you,
I watched it finally
Empty, watched until the streaked,
Reddening light of dawn came back & touched
The quiet brick of empty dance halls, touched,
Behind blackened tavern windows, a girl’s cast off
Blouse; touched even the pocked faces of musicians
On the posters there: Sick Girl;
The Misstakes—almost as if dawn light could
Hold all things, each piece
Of shattered glass, as if to bless them somehow,
Or make them whole again.
It can’t, or won’t.
And it is late for blessings: All night
I’ve held a woman who,
Tomorrow, I will not want to see again, & who,
Tomorrow, probably will feel the same
For me. And so, at last, the two of us
Will have something in common:
A slight embarrassment, or,
Someday in winter, passing on a street,
A quick, amused glance before
We turn away.
I don’t expect much anymore; or else
That city is so far away by now it seems
Made of great light, & distance,
Even though it was, mostly, only a house
Like any other, lit at dinnertime
By human speech, the oldest of stories; something
In common. I remember now,
After scolding him,
The precise & careful way
My two year old son once offered me
The crust of his own bread, holding it out
So solemnly, as if it mattered, holding it
With great care.

a toot on your horn, a flash of your brights, honk if you're lonely tonight

2009-10-21T22:43:00.005-05:00

Honk, Pulaski, VA

~3 by James Tate

Back to Nature

You should drive a big red convertible as fast as you can
into the heart of the forest, drink champagne, and say
witty things to all the creatures you meet.

Walk around kicking your tires, and if you meet any
of those endangered Camp Fire Girls, say Wohelo!

Don't you wish you had remembered to pack the pemmican!

If you pull out a white handkerchief you will almost certainly
be mistaken for a deer and shot.

Don't forget to put the top up if it rains.

When you are lost stay where you are.

Sleep is an excellent method for tracking down the jewel thieves.

When you roll over never let your body touch the ground.

Goodtime Jesus

Jesus got up one day a little later than usual. He had been dream-
ing so deep there was nothing left in his head. What was it?
A nightmare, dead bodies walking all around him, eyes rolled
back, skin falling off. But he wasn't afraid of that. It was a beau-
tiful day. How 'bout some coffee? Don't mind if I do. Take a little
ride on my donkey, I love that donkey. Hell, I love everybody.

The Parade and After the Parade

The parade was a sad little affair,
three or four tiny witches, a pirate,
a Dalmatian, a black cat, a pair of dice.
There was not even a band or a baton.
A single police car led and the rest of us
community-minded cream puffs maundered around
hoping the spirit would strike us.
A cockroach was talking to a hula-goddess
and nibbling on her lace bodice.
It was a dark day downtown
as we drifted off in space.
And then we returned to our houses
and sat down and cried into our hands,
something about not having had a mother
or a father, and this didn't make us
a freak of nature or anything, and I
patted you on the head and we stared
out the window at the uncoming necessary risks,
an activity we liked very much.
It was like walking at night with a baby
or falling asleep on a donkey
and spitting off a cliff. Otherwise,
we have pretty much forsaken popular hobbies,
such as wearing camouflage in a forest of stray thoughts.

Tell me friend if you've got the time, where in this woods does grow the healing vine?

2009-10-19T01:20:00.007-05:00

Eagle, Sylvatus, VA

Michael Hurley, "The Rue of Ruby Whores," from Weatherhole

On my way home from work tonight (or about 1 in the morning, really), a gunpowder grey cat darted in front of my pickup just as John Fogerty wailed, "things got bad and things got worse, i guess you know the tune." I think I know the tune, I told John. But, still, the cat seemed like a good omen.

Like an arrow, I was only passing through

2009-10-13T10:27:00.008-05:00

Sunset in Window, Radford, VA

~3 poems by Czeslaw Milosz

Encounter

We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.
A red wing rose in the darkness.

And suddenly a hare ran across the road.
One of us pointed to it with his hand.

That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive,
Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.

O my love, where are they, where are they going
The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.
I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.

So Little

I said so little.
Days were short.

Short days.
Short nights.
Short years.

I said so little.
I couldn't keep up.

My heart grew weary
From joy,
Despair,
Ardor,
Hope.

The jaws of Leviathan
Were closing upon me.

Naked, I lay on the shores
Of desert islands.

The white whale of the world
Hauled me down to its pit.

And now I don't know
What in all that was real.

Esse

I looked at that face, dumbfounded. The lights of métro stations flew by; I didn't notice them. What can be done, if our sight lacks absolute power to devour objects ecstatically, in an instant, leaving nothing more than the void of an ideal form, a sign like a hieroglyph simplified from the drawing of an animal or bird? A slightly snub nose, a high brow with sleekly brushed-back hair, the line of the chin - but why isn't the power of sight absolute? - and in a whiteness tinged with pink two sculpted holes, containing a dark, lustrous lava. To absorb that face but to have it simultaneously against the background of all spring boughs, walls, waves, in its weeping, its laughter, moving it back fifteen years, or ahead thirty. To have. It is not even a desire. Like a butterfly, a fish, the stem of a plant, only more mysterious. And so it befell me that after so many attempts at naming the world, I am able only to repeat, harping on one string, the highest, the unique avowal beyond which no power can attain: I am, she is. Shout, blow the trumpets, make thousands-strong marches, leap, rend your clothing, repeating only: is!

She got out at Raspail. I was left behind with the immensity of existing things. A sponge, suffering because it cannot saturate itself; a river, suffering because reflections of clouds and trees are not clouds and trees.

Yesterday I talked with my father, he said that we could never win. It’s so hard to tell where I end, and my father begins.

2009-10-11T11:32:00.008-05:00

Peek Creek, Pulaski, VA

Wheeling Motel
--Franz Wright

The vast waters flow past its back yard.
You can purchase a six-pack in bars!
Tammy Wynette’s on the marquee

a block down. It’s twenty-five years ago:
you went to death, I to life, and
which was luckier God only knows.

There’s this line in an unpublished poem of yours.
The river is like that,
a blind familiar.

The wind will die down when I say so;
the leaden and lessening light on
the current.

Then the moon will rise
like the word reconciliation,
like Walt Whitman examining the tear on a dead face.

Youth
--James Wright

Strange bird,
His song remains secret.
He worked too hard to read books.
He never heard how Sherwood Anderson
Got out of it, and fled to Chicago, furious to free himself
From his hatred of factories.
My father toiled fifty years
At Hazel-Atlas Glass,
Caught among girders that smash the kneecaps
Of dumb honyaks.
Did he shudder with hatred in the cold shadow of grease?
Maybe. But my brother and I do know
He came home as quiet as the evening.

He will be getting dark, soon,
And loom through new snow.
I know his ghost will drift home
To the Ohio River, and sit down, alone,
Whittling a root.
He will say nothing.
The waters flow past, older, younger
Than he is, or I am.

I love winners when they cry, losers when they try, music when it's good, and life

2009-10-08T12:23:00.004-05:00

Pepsi Machine, Hillsville, VA

--paragraph from John Williams' Stoner

In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart.

The boy looked at Johnny, Johnny wanted to run, but the movie kept moving as planned

2009-10-06T14:21:00.007-05:00

Untitled, Sylvatus, VA

Patti Smith--Land: Horses, Land of A Thousand Dances, La Mer (de) + Film clips from The Tracey Fragments

All my friends are funeral singers

2009-10-05T13:18:00.003-05:00

Wedding Dress in Window, Pulaski, VA

Lines For Winter
--Mark Strand

Tell yourself
as it gets cold and gray falls from the air
that you will go on
walking, hearing
the same tune no matter where
you find yourself --
inside the dome of dark
or under the cracking white
of the moon's gaze in a valley of snow.
Tonight as it gets cold
tell yourself
what you know which is nothing
but the tune your bones play
as you keep going. And you will be able
for once to lie down under the small fire
of winter stars.
And if it happens that you cannot
go on or turn back and you find yourself
where you will be at the end,
tell yourself
in that final flowing of cold through your limbs
that you love what you are.

Nights In Hackett's Cove
--Mark Strand

Those nights lit by the moon and the moon's nimbus,
the bones of the wrecked pier rose crooked in the air
and the sea wore a coat of tarnished silver.
The black pines waited. The cold air smelled
of fishheads rotting under the pier at low tide.
The moon kept shedding its silver clothes
over the bogs and pockets of bracken.
Those nights I would gaze at the bay road,
at the cottages clustered under the moon's immaculate stare,
nothing hinted that I would suffer so late
this turning away, this longing to be there.

Small Comfort
--Kath Pollitt

Coffee and cigarettes in a clean cafe,
forsythia lit like a damp match against
a thundery sky drunk on its own ozone,

the laundry cool and crisp and folded away
again in the lavender closet-too late to find
comfort enough in such small daily moments

of beauty, renewal, calm, too late to imagine
people would rather be happy than suffering
and inflicting suffering. We're near the end,

but O before the end, as the sparrows wing
each night to their secret nests in the elm's green dome
O let the last bus bring

love to lover, let the starveling
dog turn the corner and lope suddenly
miraculously, down its own street, home.

What I Understood
--Kath Pollitt

When I was a child I understood everything
about, for example, futility. Standing for hours
on the hot asphalt outfield, trudging for balls
I'd ask myself, how many times will I have to perform
this pointless task, and all the others? I knew
about snobbery, too, and cruelty—for children
are snobbish and cruel—and loneliness: in restaurants
the dignity and shame of solitary diners
disabled me, and when my grandmother
screamed at me, "Someday you'll know what it's like!"
I knew she was right, the way I knew
about the single rooms my teachers went home to,
the pictures on the dresser, the hoard of chocolates,
and that there was no God, and that I would die.
All this I understood, no one needed to tell me.
the only thing I didn't understand
was how in a world whose predominant characteristics
are futility, cruelty, loneliness, disappointment
people are saved every day
by a sparrow, a foghorn, a grassblade, a tablecloth.
This year I'll be
thirty-nine, and I still don't understand it.

Even though we all dance sometimes to a song we don’t love like we should

2009-10-01T14:53:00.009-05:00

Richard and Marilyn, Hillsville, VA

My Heart
--Frank O'Hara

I 'm not going to cry all the time
nor shall I laugh all the time
I don't prefer one "strain" to another.
I'd have the immediacy of a bad movie,
not just a sleeper, but also the big,
overproduced first-run kind. I want to be
at least as alive as the vulgar. And if
some aficionado of my mess says " That's
not like Frank! , all to the good! I
don't wear brown and grey suits all the time,
do I? NO. I wear workshirts to the opera,
often. I want my feet to be bare,
I want my face to be shaven, and my heart-
you can't plan on my heart, but
the better part of it like my poetry, is open.

Today
--Frank O'Hara

Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas!
You really are beautiful! Pearls,
harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins! all
the stuff they've always talked about

still makes a poem a surprise!
These things are with us every day
even on beachheads and biers. They
do have meaning. They're strong as rocks.

Animals
--Frank O'Hara

Have you forgotten what we were like then
when we were still first rate
and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth

it's no use worrying about Time
but we did have a few tricks up our sleeves
and turned some sharp corners

the whole pasture looked like our meal
we didn't need speedometers
we could manage cocktails out of ice and water

I wouldn't want to be faster
or greener than now if you were with me O you
were the best of all my days

I was just tryin' to paint a picture for you. But the canvas was cracked, the colors untrue

2009-09-22T17:31:00.004-05:00

Untitled, Erwin, TN

Everything And Nothing
--Borges

THERE was no one in him; behind his face (which even through the bad paintings of those times resembles no other) and his words, which were copious, fantastic and stormy, there was only a bit of coldness, a dream dreamt by no one. At first he thought that all people were like him, but the astonishment of a friend to whom he had begun to speak of this emptiness showed him his error and made him feel always that an individual should not differ in outward appearance. Once he thought that in books he would find a cure for his ill and thus he learned the small Latin and less Greek a contemporary would speak of; later he considered that what he sought might well be found in an elemental rite of humanity, and let himself be initiated by Anne Hathaway one long June afternoon. At the age of twenty-odd years he went to London. Instinctively he had already become proficient in the habit of simulating that he was someone, so that others would not discover his condition as no one; in London he found the profession to which he was predestined, that of the actor, who on a stage plays at being another before a gathering of people who play at taking him for that other person. His histrionic tasks brought him a singular satisfaction, perhaps the first he had ever known; but once -the last verse had been acclaimed and the last dead man withdrawn from the stage, the hated flavour of unreality returned to him. He ceased to be Ferrex or Tamberlane and became no one again. Thus hounded, he took to imagining other heroes and other tragic fables. And so, while his flesh fulfilled its destiny as flesh in the taverns and brothels of London, the soul that inhabited him was Caesar, who disregards the augur's admonition, and Juliet. who abhors the lark, and Macbeth, who converses on the plain with the witches who are also Fates. No one has ever been so many men as this man who like the Egyptian Proteus could exhaust all the guises of reality. At times he would leave a confession hidden away in some corner of his work, certain that it would not be deciphered; Richard affirms that in his person he plays the part of many and Iago claims with curious words 'I am not what I am'. The fundamental identity of existing, dreaming and acting inspired famous passages of his.

For twenty years he persisted in that controlled hallucination, but one morning he was suddenly gripped by the tedium and the terror of being so many kings who die by the sword and so many suffering lovers who converge, diverge and melodiously expire. That very day he arranged to sell his theatre. Within.. a week he had returned to his native village, where he recovered the trees and rivers of his childhood and did not relate them to the others his muse had celebrated, illustrious with mythological allusions and Latin terms. He had to be 'someone: he was a retired impresario who had made his fortune and concerned himself with loans, lawsuits and petty usury. It was in this character that he dictated the arid will and testament known to us, from which he deliberately excluded all traces of pathos or literature. His friends from London would visit his retreat and for them he would take up again his role as poet.

History adds that before or after dying he found himself in the presence of God and told Him: 'I who have been so many men in vain want to be one and myself.' The voice of the Lord answered from a whirlwind: 'Neither am I anyone; I have dreamt the world as you dreamt your work, my Shakespeare, and among the forms in my dream are you, who like myself are many and no one.'

She says, I'll talk to strangers if I want to, 'cause I'm a stranger here, too.

2009-09-21T15:56:00.007-05:00

Drink Coca-Cola, Labor Day Gun Show and Flea-Market, Hillsville, VA

Listen to Chris Smither...then seek out Don't It Drag On and I'm a Stranger Here, Too

There will be no end soon

2009-09-19T09:21:00.003-05:00

Labor Day Gun Show and Flea-Market, Hillsville, VA

Tear It Down
--Jack Gilbert

We find out the heart only by dismantling what
the heart knows. By redefining the morning,
we find a morning that comes just after darkness.
We can break through marriage into marriage.
By insisting on love we spoil it, get beyond
affection and wade mouth-deep into love.
We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars.
But going back toward childhood will not help.
The village is not better than Pittsburgh.
Only Pittsburgh is more than Pittsburgh.
Rome is better than Rome in the same way the sound
of raccoon tongues licking the inside walls
of the garbage tub is more than the stir
of them in the muck of the garbage. Love is not
enough. We die and are put into the earth forever.
We should insist while there is still time. We must
eat through the wildness of her sweet body already
in our bed to reach the body within that body.

Years and Years and Years Later
--Dan Albergotti

From this distance he can see that the man
is not Jack Gilbert. And he is not yet himself.
Being himself would not be better than being Gilbert.
Only Gilbert is more than Gilbert. Failure is better
than success in the same way that this poem
is still getting at something as it descends
into parody, elegy, and palimpsest at once.
We die and are put into the earth forever
is a line directly stolen from Gilbert’s “Tear It Down.”
Putting it in this poem means neither success
nor failure nor larceny. People need to read it
even if its magnitude of beauty is too difficult
for people. When I spoke with Jack on the telephone
to invite him to my university the next fall, he mostly
wanted to talk about my Italian name, to ask about
my poems. He wanted to know what I wanted
from poetry. I said I’d like to say something
to someone born two hundred years from now.
I think he approved, or I may have just heard
his enormously generous spirit smiling.
After his summer in Greece with Linda,
he could not remember ever having talked to me,
told my colleague who called to make travel arrangements
that he had never heard of our university.
Today the woman I love rejected my artificial soul.
What is it we want from poetry? When Jack Gilbert
and I have been put into the earth forever,
what will it mean if someone reads “Tear It Down” or
“Years and Years and Years Later”? Is there still time
to insist? Let my heart be feral, too wild for every
woman I love. This poem, Jack, is as helpless
as crushed birds, and still I say with you, nevertheless.

I've walked down life's lonely highways, hand-in-hand with myself

2009-09-16T18:08:00.005-05:00

Untitled, Sylvatus, VA

Interesting video for Bonnie "Prince" Billy's "How About Thank You"

"Where you came from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it."--Hazel Motes in Wise Blood

It's been such a long time, we should grease up this watch of mine

2009-09-14T09:23:00.002-05:00

Phone Cards, Raphine, VA

Can you deny there's nothing greater, nothing more than the travelling hands of time?

2009-09-09T11:25:00.013-05:00

Time, Labor Day Gun Show and Flea Market, Hillsville, VA

John Darnielle (Mountain Goats) interviewed about his upcoming album, The Life of the World To Come. Every song on the album references a particular Bible verse. We've been reading Flannery O'Connor in my American Lit. class, and much of what Darnielle has to say dovetails nicely with O'Connor's stories of spiritual affliction.

Pitchfork: How does the sentiment of the chorus relate to the story of the verses?

JD: There's a number of different ways of feeling holy and connected with God. One way you can get really close to God is to sin as hard as you can. Because there's only one person, in theory, who can save you from that. His whole job, in a sense, is to absolve you of sin, to forgive you of sin. You're not supposed to, but you can test God by doing a lot of terrible things. If you directly intend to offend him, though, it would probably be the most direct, in a sense-- this is kind of Hare Krishna stuff, where they talk about the different ways you can stand with God. One is as a lover, but another is as His enemy. Because when you are engaging with someone in a position of enmity, that is also a very intimate relationship.

So these people are doing some bad things and one of them, the one who sins, is sort of experiencing a connection to God in the depths of his degradation-- which I think is almost a universal experience. When do you cry out to the God you don't believe in? When you hit bottom. That's the moment at which you are going to sort of know Him best. I don't even know, when I say Him, if I should put it in quotes or not, because I don't want to sound like I'm actually saying that. But I'm also saying that your ideas of God will come to rest upon you in your moment of profoundest degradation, which is kind of what that song is about.

Pitchfork: In the Bible, Genesis 3:23 is a verse about being cast out of the Garden of Eden. What you just described does not sound very much like a Garden of Eden.

JD: Well, everything's Edenic. Everything is. I really don't know what your past is like, but I've got to assume, like everyone else, you have plenty of pain in it, right? But when you go back to the places where the pain was at, you find that there was more stuff there, and that there's stuff about it that you miss just because it's you. Because that's who you were, and you grow to accept that. When you do that kind of stuff, whether it's Eden or not, it is. Every place that you left is Eden in some way.

I've been in fear of sounding portentous when talking about this record, but when you're starting with Biblical concepts, that can be a delicate balancing act. If you're trying to do heavy stuff, it' s hard not to come off portentous, but that might be how it comes out.

Here's Darnielle performing "Jeff Davis County Blues" at the First Unitarian Church in Philadelphia

We drifted over the sea, where it hurts too much to look, it hurts to try and see

2009-09-08T14:45:00.007-05:00

Vessel, Labor Day Gun Show and Flea Market, Hillsville, VA

2 by Andrei Codrescu

sea sickness

dancers strapped to canoes is
what the morning brings. they are tied
to a perpetual dance.
hooded folks in lighthouses
count on their fingers as the day
gets brighter, everywhere
dancing is either law
or crime. i have no particular
taste for this world. i am looking
for an utterly still completely
dead hotel.

about photography

I hate photographs,
those square paper Judases of the world,
the fakers of love’s image of all things.
They show you parents where the frogs of doom
are standing under the heavenly flour,
they picture grassy slopes
where the bugs of accident whirr twisted
in the flaws of the world.
It is weird,
this violence of particulars
against the unity of being.

Japanese Girl with Red Table
--Stephen Dobyns

The Japanese girl thinks she will die today.
In her mirror, she sees she is already dying
and she tries to compose her face into how
it will appear in death: forgiving, forgetful.
Between her white breasts, she already sees
the red mark of the knife—red as the red table
on the floor behind her, red as the red border
of the purple robe falling open around her
as she kneels before the mirror. Yes, she thinks,
she will destroy herself today; and her lover,
who has not come, will hear of it from people
crying to each other as he passes on the street
with his destination a solid object in his mind,
as real as the red table or the black and white
vase upon the table. He will hear that a girl
has been found with a knife in her breast,
but he won’t believe it’s she as he continues
toward the red table in his mind. Then at last
some friend will bring him the news, tell him
while he sits with his wife in the early evening,
eating sweets and drinking tea as he describes
the small business of his day. He will be holding
a porcelain cup with a picture of a single gull,
and he will listen to how a girl has been found
lying naked in her own blood on the golden rug
he gave her, while within him the words will be
eating his body as fire eats paper, as he tries
hopelessly to hold his cup steady and make no face.

I gave up on my sculpturing 'cause my life had gone all sad, an I went to work down at the factory, it weren't art but it weren't bad

2009-09-07T16:21:00.005-05:00

Ben Franklin, Labor Day Gun Show and Flea Market, Hillsville, VA

Another song that provided company last winter: Hoyt Axton's "Snowblind Friend"

God ain't jive, for I can see his love as it runs alive one by one through fields of rusted wire

2009-09-03T12:39:00.006-05:00

Have You Seen Me?, Big Walker Mountain, Virginia

I spent most of last winter holed up in a small trailer in Grayson County, drinking grean-tea or Virginia Gentleman and listening to Hoyt Axton and Mott the Hoople records I bought at an antique store in Mouth of Wilson. Here's one of the songs I listened to repeatedly.

tried to fight the creeping sense of dread with temporal things, most of the time I guess I felt alright

2009-09-01T06:42:00.004-05:00

Brooklyn, New York

--a couple songs from the mountain goats' all hail west texas.

jeff davis county blues.

after three nights in jail, i head north from toyahvale,
switch to 285 in pecos, head up to red bluff.
my walk's real steady and my eyes are real cold
but i feel like i'm all of sixteen years old --
lost in the travel lodge, with the television on and the sound down,
i don't feel so tough.
old issues of sunset magazine to read,
sleep for twelve hours, and dream about home.

i have no place to go, so i drive up to new mexico.
fix my eyes in the rearview when i cross the state line.
and i panic, i guess. and although it's quite late,
i take the first exit to 128.
i am coming back to midlind.
i hope you won't mind.
polaroids of the two of us scattered on the passenger's seat.
i drive slowly
and evenly
and i dream about home.

distant stations.

i found an old rock in the dry dirt outside
the door of my motel room.
it was a triangle with soft rounded edges
and a split down the middle of one corner.
it was darker than english moss.
green like the soft frills of a peacock's plume.
i waited for you, but i never told you where i was.
it was you who taught me how to write these kinds of equations.
i waited on the steps for you,
and i hid in the bushes whenever a car pulled into the parking lot.
you taught me how to listen to these distant stations.
distant stations.

i saw the sky break.
i threw a rock at a crow who was playing in the mulch of some rose bushes by the motel office.
missed him by a good yard or two.
i sang old songs from nowhere.
los angeles.
albuquerque.
i said a small prayer for the poor and the naked and the hungry.
and i prayed real hard for you.
i waited for you, but i never told you where i was.
it was you who taught me how to write this kind of equation.
i waited on the steps for you,
and i hid in the bushes whenever a car pulled into the parking lot.
you taught me how to listen to these distant stations.
distant stations.

Cross over shame like a wise dove, who cares not for fame just for shy love

2009-08-28T11:14:00.007-05:00

Doves, Brooklyn, NY

Life on the Prairie
--Mark Conway

Why do we stay here, sleeping on a dwarf
dream, the subtitles shaky, waking to fish
for loose change? I’d like to go inside nowwhere it’s warm and you never know
what’s next. Under the Big Top
of my mobile home, a survival kit’s included. It’s a real time-saver, what’s more,
it works — I’m spared the spectacle
of the chapped, you know, the portable sky. Inside we have our own dome, sugar
doughnuts, and the outline of an escape.
I don’t find that comforting. But it beats

sleeping on the knife. The meadowlark has
just one song. Clearly, we hear what we’ve
missed. I live here anyway, in a landscape
shaped like it’s impossible to end.

The Founding of Friendship, Texas
--David Daniel

The burial of Anna, age six months,
First dead in the new land,
Was a cause for celebration.
Not only had her soul—they saw it!—
Risen with a flock of scissortails
To join Mary's virgin train above,
But they knew, being gamblers also
On the fleshy souls of cotton and maize,
That she did not, in fact, rise
But burrowed into the black soil
To mingle with eternity here.
After a year of traveling, the family
Could finally stop, for the love of Anna
And the promise of the land
She had become, land that rose so slightly
At the San Gabriel River,
Where the only trees in sight
Shimmer a string of emeralds
On the dusty breast of Friendship, Texas.

Fools of Time
--David Daniel

At seventeen Mary placed her satin dress beside us on the table,
Then she smiled at me and we did the best that we were able.
Back on the dance floor, she seemd to hang in the air like an angel

We were fools for love, making a fool out of time.

Soon I left town because I fell in love with leaving,
And Mary married some boy she thought that she could believe in.
back on the dance floor would could know what we were seeking:

We were fools for love, now we’re just the fools of time.

Last year Mary jumped from a hotel outside of Nashville.
With her dress blown out she must have seemed like an angel of disaster—
Maybe now she knows the things that we were after.

We were fools for love, now we’re the fools of time.

If anyone should ask me if I be a rambling boy, the sporting life I know I have enjoyed

2009-08-27T09:55:00.006-05:00

Williamsburg Bridge, Brooklyn, NY

Bert Jansch's LA Turnaround (re-issued by Drag City in June) has been an almost nightly summer listen. "Travelling Man" is the 2nd song on that album. In this vid, the music starts around 1:20.

There's no plan we can fall back on, the road this far can't be retraced, there's no punchline anybody can tack on, there are loose ends by the score

2009-08-26T10:13:00.003-05:00

Horses, Cana, VA

Only the Crossing Counts
--CD Wright

It's not how we leave one's life. How go off
the air. You never know do you. You think you're ready
for anything; then it happens, and you're not. You're really
not. The genesis of an ending, nothing
but a feeling, a slow movement, the dusting
of furniture with a remnant of the revenant's shirt.
Seeing the candles sink in their sockets; we turn
away, yet the music never quits. The fire kisses our face.
O phthsis, o lotharian dead eye, no longer
will you gaze on the baize of the billiard table. No more
shooting butter dishes out of the sky. Scattering light.
Between snatches of poetry and penitence you left
the brumal wood of men and women. Snow drove
the butterflies home. You must know
how it goes, known all along what to expect,
sooner or later … the faded cadence of anonymity.
Frankly, my dear, frankly, my dear, frankly

Death
--Bill Knott

Going to sleep, I cross my hands on my chest.
They will place my hands like this.
It will look as though I am flying into myself.

You held your closed hand out to me, and you told me to guess what you had inside

2009-08-25T10:02:00.007-05:00

Dari Ace, Erwin, TN

--a paragraph from Richard Ford's The Lay of the Land, one of the books I'm currently reading:

"The other distraction making movement into the Square near impossible is that the Historical Society, in a fit of Thanksgiving spirit and under the rubric of "Sharing Our Village Past," has converted the entire Square in front of the August Inn and the Post Office into a Pigrim Village Interpretative Center. Two Am. Civ. professors from Trenton State with time on their hands have constructed a replica Pilgrim town with three windowless, dirt-floor Pilgrim houses, trucked-in period barnyard animals, and lots of authentic buy unhandy Pilgrim implements, built a hand-adzed paled fence, laid in a subsistence garden and produced old-timey clothes and authentically inadequate footwear for the Pilgrims themselves. Inside the village they've installed a collection of young Pilgrims--a Negro Pilgrim, a Jewish female Pilgrim, a wheel-chair-bound Pilgrim, a Japanese Pilgrim with a learning disability, plus two or three ordinary kids--all of whom spend their days doing toilsome Pilgrim chores in drab, ill-fitting garments, chattering to themselves about rock videos while they hew logs, boil clothes, rip up sod, make soap in iron caldrons and spin more cloth, but now and then pausing to step forth, just like soap-opera characters on Christmas Day, to deliver loud declarations about the "first hard days of 1620" and how it's impossible to imagine the character and dedication of the first people and how our American stock was cured by tough times, blab, blab, blab, blab--all this to whoever might be idle enough to stop on the way to the liquor store to listen. Every night the young Pilgrims disappear to a motel out on Route 1, fill their bellies with pizza and smoke dope till their heads explode, and who'd blame them?"

Maybe me and my shadow can go runnin' in the wind, and we can feel alright again

2009-08-24T08:37:00.009-05:00

Mountain Man Flea Market, Cana, VA

Larry Jon Wilson live at Silver Moon Lounge, 2007

Tema

2009-08-23T14:19:00.005-05:00

Tema Stauffer, Brooklyn, New York

In early May, I took a trip to New York City to visit Tema Stauffer, a great photographer and even better person--down-to-earth, kind, intelligent, a great listener..not to mention glamorous, savvy, and sophisticated. Tema, thanks for putting me up and putting up with me during my stay. I hope you're able to make a trip to Pulaski in the fall.

A friend of mine became a father last night, when he spoke in his voice I could hear the light

2009-07-19T17:17:00.004-05:00

Katherine Ann Harrod
Born June 23, 2009
Photo by Josh and Kristen

What better way to revive the blog than welcoming Katherine Ann Harrod into the world? Katherine is the strikingly cute daughter of two of my closest friends, Josh and Kristen Harrod.

many a hand has scaled the grand old face of the plateau

2009-05-06T16:26:00.013-05:00

Joe, Sylvatus, VA

--a photo from one of the first rolls of film I shot for a class in the fall of 2006, which is when I decided photography might be an interesting thing to do with some of my time.

Poem For Malcom Lowry
-- by Jon Cone

Señor, another mescal.
My thirst is cruel,
This coffin endless.

Joe, enjoy Ecuador

Someday I will transcend, just like Jane's Addiction, but today I simply I'm in a rut, I'm in a rut

2009-05-05T11:36:00.011-05:00

Untitled (Marlboro Men), Stuart, VA

While taking breaks between grading student papers this week, I've been reading Rick Bass's The Watch. It's an engaging, if uneven, collection of stories. Here's a couple paragraphs from "The Government Bears," one of my favorites in the bunch:

When I was twenty-seven I was hit in the head by a man wielding a fourteen-inch pipe wrench. He was about a hundred pounds heavier than I was. Sometimes when I throw two fifty-pound sacks of feed out of the truck and listen to them hit I think about that. He was much larger than I was but I killed him.

It wasn't even over some woman, or a horse or a dog, or our mothers' names: it was just plain bad blood, that odd thing, right from the very start. I had worked with him about a week, and one day he said he didn't like me because my clothes were always too clean and because he said he had seen me looking down the creek like a crazy man, just watching it, when there was nothing there, in the middle of the summer. We were working up on the Big Black, drilling Tinsley Field: cotton everywhere, and the magic flat sky. Honeysuckle crept and smelled good right on down and into the creek: the water was muddy, and alligators lived in there. If you watched, you could see one every now and then.

I suppose these paragraphs remind me of some of the jobs I've had, like one last summer working for a commercial mowing crew. We mowed/trimmed the 481 bypass, which is 14 miles or so of four-lane connecting Christiansburg and Blacksburg, Virginia. I was fascinated by the change of view afforded by walking vs. speeding along at 65 mph--the angles of some of the bridges, the colors of the weeds and flowers growing in the median, things like that. I mentioned it to some of the guys I worked with, and they gave me odd looks. I don't think any of them wanted to cleave me in two, but perhaps I'm wrong.

Sometimes a notion swells like the ocean, and I can't think where I should be

2009-05-04T09:58:00.010-05:00

Untitled, Princeton, WV

Postcard from Searsburg
--Wyn Cooper

What was it you wanted he calls out the door
as I walk toward his house, which tilts uphill.
I just wanted to ask, I start to say — but he
cuts me off, tells me he doesn’t talk to strangers,
says that I should go away. I tell him I like
his old car, I name the year and model,
and soon he is shaking my hand,
inviting me in for home-brewed beer.

After my second and his who-knows-
how-many-pints, he tells me he’s ready
for the government when they come.
He takes me down to the cellar, filled
With enough food for years, calendars
for the coming one, enough water for
about a month. He shows me the vegetables
he’s growing under lights, but I can’t see them.

I swirl out the door like the windmills
we watched from his den, ten spinning,
one broken. I stand in his driveway
and feel them, their slow whipping roar.
The town’s elevation is unmatched,
except by a few of its people, higher
than kites from the slogans they write
on the outside of their dwellings,
which no wind has managed to blow down.

I've been looking for my shadow, but this place is so bright and so clean

2009-05-03T11:27:00.013-05:00

Redbud? and Powerlines, Pulaski, VA

Tree
--Jane Hirshfield

It is foolish
to let a young redwood
grow next to a house.

Even in this
one lifetime,
you will have to choose.

That great calm being,
this clutter of soup pots and books--

already the first branch-tips brush at the window.
Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.

I ended up in search of ordinary things, like how can a wave possibly be

2009-05-01T07:04:00.017-05:00

Untitled (Wal-Mart Parking Lot), Radford, VA

I've been really enjoying Bill Callahan's newest album, Sometimes I Wish I Were An Eagle. The opening track, "Jim Cain," is ostensibly about James Cain, author of The Postman Always Rings Twice, but it certainly reflects Callahan's own artistic trajectory. The song also makes me think of "Binx" Bolling, the protagonist of Percy's The Moviegoer, a novel I've been re-reading recently with my American Lit. class. Binx's "search" is for ordinary things, concrete reality, not the abstract truth of science or, often, religion; and the pleasure he takes in the mystery of ordinary things seems similar to photographers like Eggleston or Friedlander.

To me, Callahan's album seems to be dealing with similar issues--a skepticism toward the schemes and concepts we use to prop our lives up, and an acknowledgement that that light and dark (and self/world) is a continuum, not a series of either/or moments. The final song on the album, "Faith/Void," recalls "Permanent Smile" from Callahan's 2000 album Dongs of Sevotion, but whereas "Permanent Smile" dealt with death ("Oh God, by being quiet, I hope to alleviate my death. Oh God, by being still, I hope to lighten your load"), "Faith/Void" seems like an enjoinder to move beyond preoccupations with God and death and dwell attentively in mystery.

Jim Cain

I started out in search of ordinary things
how much of a tree bends in the wind
I started telling the story without knowing the end.

I used to be darker, then I got lighter, then I got dark again.
Something too big to be seen was passing over and over me.
Well it seemed like a routine case at first,
with the death of the shadow came a lightness of verse,
but the darkest of nights, in truth, still dazzles
and I work myself until I'm frazzled.

I ended up in search of ordinary things
like how can a wave possibly be?
I started running, when the concrete turned to sand.
I started running, when things didn't pan out as planned.

In case things go poorly and I not return,
remember the good things I done.
In case things go poorly and I not return,
remember the good things I done.

Or done me in.

I know nothing, and I'm overjoyed

2009-04-30T14:47:00.002-05:00

Evening Walk, Pulaski, VA

What is the nature of the search? You ask. Really it is very simple; at least for a fellow like me. So simple that it is often overlooked. The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. This morning, for example, I felt as if I had come to myself on a strange island. And what does such a castaway do? Why, he pokes around the neighborhood and doesn’t miss a trick. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.

--Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

Weekend in Photos--April 25th, 26th

2009-04-26T21:24:00.023-05:00

Saturday, 9 AM--11:30 AM--Alissa and Dylan's Soccer Games

I got up at 6 or so Saturday morning and drove to Harrisonburg to spend Saturday with my kids. They both had soccer games in the morning--Alissa's at 9 o'clock and Dylan's at 10 o'clock.

12:30-3:00-Fun Day at Stone Spring Elementary School

After the game, we went to Alissa and Dylan's elementary school for fun day. I couldn't get many photos because I was busy trying to keep up with the kids as they ran from one game to another. I did get a couple shots when they were on the "moonwalk." In the bottom photo Alissa is posing beside an award winning drawing she did for an art competition.

3:30-6:30 Wandering Around Downtown Harrisonburg

After fun day, the kids went back home so Dylan could take a nap and Alissa could get ready for her dance recital later in the evening. In the break, I maundered around downtown Harrisonburg snapping photos of whatever caught my eye. I took about 75 shots, so I'm limiting my posting to some that are perhaps (or perhaps not) better than the others.

6:45-9:30
I took a few photos at Alissa's dance recital, but none of them turned out well at all. There really wasn't enough light, and I was too far away from the stage. I'm kind of disappointed I didn't get a few good shots of Alissa, but her dance was great.

I started driving home Saturday night, but felt kind of exhausted so I decided to look for a cheap hotel.

I hit the Interstate again this morning. Around Natural Bridge, I got off of I-81 and took Route 11 through Buchanan, where they were staging this Civil War reenactment.

Sunday 10-1

He once was a man of god, before he was taken down a notch

2009-04-24T10:01:00.004-05:00

Solid Rock Holiness Church, Pulaski, VA

If you could only stop your heartbeat for one heartbeat

2009-04-24T08:55:00.007-05:00

Apple Tree and Old Cars, Stuart, VA

2 poems by Gerald Stern

HEMINGWAY'S HOUSE

I don’t want to go to Hemingway’s house,
let him come to mine, walk in and we’ll do
The Killers at my kitchen table, he with his
back to the Japanese maple, me with my back
to the Maytag, ginger ale for one, white rum
the other; the dragon and the mayfly, death and the knowledge of death,
Monk and Bartók all the same to me.

PLACES YOU WOULDN'T BELIEVE

I liked this hotel best because the swimming pool
was on the roof and I was closer by an inch
to the sun that way and there were birds thereby
that fit into the landscape more and flew at
right angles to my elevated body
as I crawled up and down the cement lanes
guided vaguely by the wavering tar; and
I liked the fact that there was a national newspaper
every morning at my door and the rugs were
hideous, and that was that, and they were
poorly laid to boot, and I even tripped
and spilled my coffee following the wrong
red arrow once, but I have had an hour
of mercy at the makeshift desk or in the
lobby, such as it was, and I have had mercy
in places you wouldn't believe, so much that I
am ruthless about it; I started with an orange crate
in my living room, and that was that; I know it was
lit up by a brazen dancer with the torches
growing from her belly, my first mercy.

some of my friends don't know who they belong to, some can't get a single thing to work inside

2009-04-19T15:58:00.015-05:00

Untitled (Patrick County Auto Show), Stuart, VA

a shark and dog and now you're laughing, the dog licks the shark dry in your photographing

2009-04-14T09:46:00.010-05:00

The Singing Nippers Tour Wagon, Pulaski, VA

Bonnie "Prince" Billy, "Disorder"--3/20/09

Bonnie "Prince" Billy, "My Life's Work"--3/13/09

Bill Callahan's newest, Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle, is out today.

Also, check out Chris Taylor's webpage--he shot the cover photo for Callahan's album, and he's releasing a book of Callahan photos later this year.

An eagle came over the horizon, shook the branches with its sight

2009-04-09T17:58:00.010-05:00

Untitled (Hall Cemetary), Bottom Creek Gorge, VA

Mountain Graveyard
--Robert Morgan

Spore Prose
stone notes
slate tales
sacred cedars
heart earth
asleep please
hated death

August, 1959: Morning Service
--Ron Rash

Beside the open window
on the cemetery side,
I drowsed as Preacher Lusk gripped
his Bible like a bat snagged
from the pentecostal gloom.
In that room where heat clabbered
like churned butter, my eyes closed,
freed my mind into the light
on the window’s other side,
followed the dreamy bell-ring
of Randy Ford's cows across
Licklog Creek to a spring pool
where orange salamanders swirled
and scuttled like flames. It was
not muttered words that urged me
back to that church, nor was it
the hard comfort of pews rowed
like the gravestones of my kin,
but the a cappella hymn
sung by my great-aunt, this years
before the Smithsonian
taped her voice as if the song
of some vanishing species,
which it was, which all songs are,
years before the stroke wrenched her
face into a gnarled silence,
this morning before all that
she led us across Jordan,
and the gravestones leaned as if
even the dead were listening.

I was a stranger, they don't come much stranger

2009-04-09T17:06:00.002-05:00

Untitled (E-Z Way Laundrette), Pulaski, VA

The World And I
--Laura Riding

This is not exactly what I mean
Any more than the sun is the sun.
But how to mean more closely
If the sun shines but approximately?
What a world of awkwardness!
What hostile implements of sense!
Perhaps this is as close a meaning
As perhaps becomes such knowing.
Else I think the world and I
Must live together as strangers and die—
A sour love, each doubtful whether
Was ever a thing to love the other.
No, better for both to be nearly sure
Each of each—exactly where
Exactly I and exactly the world
Fail to meet by a moment, and a word.

Things To Do In The Belly Of The Whale
--Dan Albergotti

Measure the walls. Count the ribs. Notch the long days.
Look up for blue sky through the spout. Make small fires
with the broken hulls of fishing boats. Practice smoke signals.
Call old friends, and listen for echoes of distant voices.
Organize your calendar. Dream of the beach. Look each way
for the dim glow of light. Work on your reports. Review
each of your life’s ten million choices. Endure moments
of self-loathing. Find the evidence of those before you.
Destroy it. Try to be very quiet, and listen for the sound
of gears and moving water. Listen for the sound of your heart.
Be thankful that you are here, swallowed with all hope,
where you can rest and wait. Be nostalgic. Think of all
the things you did and could have done. Remember
treading water in the center of the still night sea, your toes
pointing again and again down, down into the black depths.

all these fine memories are fucking me down

2009-03-26T10:52:00.002-05:00

Air-Conditioner, Martinsville, VA

Every day I tell myself it's temporary

2009-03-22T15:07:00.007-05:00

Elvis Among Sparrows, Stuart, VA

Love the Wild Swan
--Robinson Jeffers

“I hate my verses, every line, every word.
Oh pale and brittle pencils ever to try
One grass-blade’s curve, or the throat of one bird
That clings to twig, ruffled against white sky.
Oh cracked and twilight mirrors ever to catch
One color, one glinting flash, of the splendor of things.
Unlucky hunter, Oh bullets of wax,
The lion beauty, the wild-swan wings, the storm of the wings.”
—This wild swan of a world is no hunter’s game.
Better bullets than yours would miss the white breast,
Better mirrors than yours would crack in the flame.
Does it matter whether you hate your...self? At least
Love your eyes that can see, your mind that can
Hear the music, the thunder of the wings. Love the wild swan.

Feeling the amber currents flowing from my mind

2009-03-22T13:50:00.012-05:00

3 photos taken whilst exploring the wino trails near peak creek.

THE KOOL-AID WINO
--Richard Brautigan

When I was a child I had a friend who became a Kool-Aid wino as the result of a rupture. He was a member of a very large and poor German family. All the older children in the family had to work in the fields during the summer, picking beans for two-and-one-half cents a pound to keep the family going. Everyone worked except my friend who couldn’t because he was ruptured. There was no money for an operation. There wasn’t even enough money to buy him a truss. So he stayed home and became a Kool-Aid wino.

One morning in August I went over to his house. He was still in bed. He looked up at me from underneath a tattered revolution of old blankets. He had never slept under a sheet in his life.

“Did you bring the nickel you promised?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s here in my pocket.”

“Good.”

He hopped out of bed and he was already dressed. He had told me once that he never took off his clothes when he went to bed.

“Why bother?” he had said. “You’re only going to get up, anyway. Be prepared for it. You’re not fooling anyone by taking your clothes off when you go to bed.”

He went into the kitchen, stepping around the littlest children, whose wet diapers were in various stages of anarchy. He made his breakfast: a slice of homemade bread covered with Karo syrup and peanut butter.

“Let’s go,” he said.

We left the house with him still eating the sandwich. The store was three blocks away, on the other side of a field covered with heavy yellow grass. There were many pheasants in the field. Fat with summer they barely flew away when we came up to them.

“Hello, ” said the grocer. He was bald with a red birthmark on his head. The birthmark looked just like an old car parked on his head. He automatically reached for a package of grape Kool-Aid and put it on the counter.

“Five cents.”

“He’s got it, ” my friend said.

I reached into my pocket and gave the nickel to the grocer. He nodded and the old red car wobbled back and forth on the road as if the driver were having an epileptic seizure.

We left.

My friend led the way across the field. One of the pheasants didn’t even bother to fly. He ran across the field in front of us like a feathered pig. When we got back to my friend’s house the ceremony began. To him the making of Kool-Aid was a romance and a ceremony. It had to be performed in an exact manner and with dignity.

First he got a gallon jar and we went around to the side of the house where the water spigot thrust itself out of the ground like the finger of a saint, surrounded by a mud puddle.

He opened the Kool-Aid and dumped it into the jar. Putting the jar under the spigot, he turned the water on. The water spit, splashed and guzzled out of the spigot.

He was careful to see that the jar did not overflow and the precious Kool-Aid spill out onto the ground. When the jar was full he turned the water off with a sudden but delicate motion like a famous brain surgeon removing a disordered portion of the imagination. Then he screwed the lid tightly onto the top of the jar and gave it a good shake. The first part of the ceremony was over.

Like the inspired priest of an exotic cult, he had performed the first part of the ceremony well.

His mother came around the side of the house and said in a voice filled with sand and string, “When are you going to do the dishes? … Huh?”

“Soon, ” he said.

“Well, you better, ” she said.

When she left, it was as if she had never been there at all. The second part of the ceremony began with him carrying the jar very carefully to an abandoned chicken house in the back. “The dishes can wait, ” he said to me. Bertrand Russell could not have stated it better.
He opened the chicken house door and we went in. The place was littered with half-rotten comic books. They were like fruit under a tree. In the corner was an old mattress and beside the mattress were four quart jars. He took the gallon jar over to them, and filled them carefully not spilling a drop. He screwed their caps on tightly and was now ready for a day’s drinking.

You’re supposed to make only two quarts of Kool-Aid from a package, but he always made a gallon, so his Kool-Aid was a mere shadow of its desired potency. And you’re supposed to add a cup of sugar to every package of Kool-Aid, but he never put any sugar in his Kool-Aid because there wasn’t any sugar to put in it.

He created his own Kool-Aid reality and was able to illuminate himself by it.

The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face.

2009-03-19T09:43:00.012-05:00

Donna, Pulaski, VA

ABSENCES

--Donald Justice

It’s snowing this afternoon and there are no flowers.
There is only this sound of falling, quiet and remote,
Like the memory of scales descending the white keys
Of a childhood piano -- outside the window, palms!
And the heavy head of the cereus, inclining,
Soon to let down its white or yellow-white.

Now, only these poor snow-flowers in a heap,
Like the memory of a white dress cast down . . .
So much has fallen.

And I, who have listened for a step
All afternoon, hear it now, but already falling away,
Already in memory. And the terrible scales descending
On the silent piano; the snow; and the absent flowers abounding.

there's no rhythm in your fall, there's nothing to dance to at all

2009-03-16T17:26:00.008-05:00

Untitled (Gym City Towing), Pulaski, VA

--part 1 of CK Williams poem "The Foundation"

Watch me, I’m running, watch me, I’m dancing, I’m air;
the building I used to live in has been razed and I’m skipping,
hopping, two-footedly leaping across the blocks, bricks,
slabs of concrete, plaster, and other unnameable junk . . .

Or nameable, really, if you look at the wreckage closely . . .
Here, for instance, this shattered I-beam is the Bible,
and this chunk of mortar? Plato, the mortar of mind,
also in pieces, in pieces in me, anyway, in my mind . . .

Aristotle and Nietzsche, Freud and Camus and Buber,
and Christ, even, that year of reading “Paradise Lost,”
when I thought, Hell, why not? but that fractured, too . . .
Kierkegaard, Hegel, and Kant, and Goffman and Marx,

all heaped in the foundation, and I’ve sped through so often
that now I have it by heart, can run, dance, be air,
not think of the spew of intellectual dust I scuffed up
when in my barely broken-in boots I first clumped through

the sanctums of Buddhism, Taoism, Zen, and the Areopagite,
even, whose entire text I typed out—my god, why?—
I didn’t care, I just kept bumping my head on the lintels,
Einstein, the Gnostics, Kabbalah, Saint This and Saint That . . .

like the absence that more and more crowds into my mind

2009-03-12T14:56:00.005-05:00

Untitled, Princeton, West Virginia

Drag City has a video for Bonnie "Prince" Billy's "I Am Goodbye," a song on the upcoming album Beware. Also check out this interview with Oldham in the LA Times.

Nighttime's the right time to pull all the dimes from your pocket

2009-03-11T15:08:00.003-05:00

Weasel's Graffitti, Peak Creek Dam, Pulaski, VA

Friend and fellow photographer Bill Ratcliffe has a new photography webpage . Check it out. The "Ghost Town" series features decaying buildings around Pulaski--the first building in the series is one that I photographed quite a few times myself. Unfortunately, the town recently had it torn down, and now an empty lot has taken its place.

sleep on your back, put ash in your shoes, and always use the old sense of the words

2009-03-10T13:12:00.005-05:00

Jake, Pulaski, VA

I met Jake on an old railroad trestle in Pulaski. I was photographing the rust-covered supports and Peak Creek behind, trying to do something with the rust and the golden evening sunlight, but I wasn't really getting anything I was happy with. Just as I was about to leave, Jake came walking up the abandoned rails holding his skateboard in one hand and a Mt. Dew in the other. He looked like a nice enough guy, so I struck up a conversation with him and asked if I could take his photo in front of the creek. He said yes, and I took this photo and a few others. In general I don't feel like I handle portraits very well, but I'm happy with this one. I like eagle on the front of Jake's shirt, and the way his hair matches the golden brown of the sunlight hitting the trees in the background.

I am goodbye, like the end of something wonderful sometimes

2009-03-04T13:09:00.002-05:00

2 Polaroids, Pulaski, VA

there will be no end soon

2009-02-26T18:25:00.006-05:00

Untitled, Pembroke, Virginia

Some folks inherit star-spangled eyes

2009-02-26T11:45:00.002-05:00

Untitled (Save-A-Lot Parking Lot), Pulaski, VA

Money is like us in time, it lies, but can't stand up

2009-02-24T18:59:00.011-05:00

Untitled (Pawn Country), Pearisburg, VA

i see progress in paint peeling...

2009-02-22T14:02:00.011-05:00

Untitled, Pulaski, VA

3 poems by Rilke

THE WAIT

It is life in slow motion,
it's the heart in reverse,
it's a hope-and-a-half:
too much and too little at once.

It's a train that suddenly
stops with no station around,
and we can hear the cricket,
and, leaning out the carriage

door, we vainly contemplate
a wind we feel that stirs
the blooming meadows, the meadows
made imaginary by this stop.

CHILDHOOD

It would be good to give much thought, before
you try to find words for something so lost,
for those long childhood afternoons you knew
that vanished so completely -and why?

We're still reminded-: sometimes by a rain,
but we can no longer say what it means;
life was never again so filled with meeting,
with reunion and with passing on

as back then, when nothing happened to us
except what happens to things and creatures:
we lived their world as something human,
and became filled to the brim with figures.

And became as lonely as a sheperd
and as overburdened by vast distances,
and summoned and stirred as from far away,
and slowly, like a long new thread,
introduced into that picture-sequence
where now having to go on bewilders us.

AGAIN AND AGAIN, HOWEVER WE KNOW THE LANDSCAPE OF LOVE

Again and again, however we know the landscape of love
and the little churchyard there, with its sorrowing names,
and the frighteningly silent abyss into which the others
fall: again and again the two of us walk out together
under the ancient trees, lie down again and again
among the flowers, face to face with the sky.

i see nothing to be gained by any explanation. there are no words that need to be said.

2009-02-19T17:17:00.013-05:00

West Main Street from Peak Creek Mercantile, Pulaski, VA

YESTERDAY DOWN AT THE CANAL
--Frank O'Hara

You say that everything is very simple and interesting
it makes me feel very wistful, like reading a great Russian novel
does

i am terribly bored
sometimes it is like seeing a bad movie
other days, more often, it's like having an acute disease of the
kidney

god knows it has nothing to do with the heart
nothing to do with people more interesting than myself
yak yak
that's an amusing thought
how can anyone be more amusing than oneself
how can anyone fail to be
can I borrow your forty-five
I only need one bullet preferably silver
if you can't be interesting at least you can be a legend
(but I hate all that crap)

DEER AMONG CATTLE
--James Dickey

Here and there in the searing beam
Of my hand going through the night meadow
They all are grazing

With pins of human light in their eyes.
A wild one also is eating
The human grass,

Slender, graceful, domesticated
By darkness among the bred-
for-slaughter,

Having bounded their paralyzed fence
And inclined his branched forehead onto
Their green frosted table,

The only live thing in this flashlight
Who can leave whenever he wishes,
Turn grass into forest,

Foreclose inhuman brightness from his eyes
But stands here, unperturbed,
In their wide-open country,

The sparks from my hand in his pupils
Unmatched anywhere among cattle,

Grazing with them the night of the hammer
As one of their own who shall rise.

I started out in search of ordinary things, like how much of a tree bends in the wind

2009-02-14T09:48:00.009-05:00

Fairlane, Pulaski, VA

some favorite films--

Dead Man
Arizona Dream
Badlands
Days of Heaven
George Washington
All the Real Girls
Blue Velvet
Wild At Heart
The Straight Story
My Own Private Idaho
Junebug
Paris, Texas
Stroszek
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
The Devil, Probably
Cockfighter
Jesus' Son
Picnic at Hanging Rock
Walkabout
The Big Lebowski
Without Limits: The Steve Prefontaine Story

Your heart is a hungry hunter, your mind is a lonely target

2009-02-12T11:19:00.004-05:00

Rust, Pulaski, VA

--from "Light Warrior"
Eileen Myles

My name means Light Warrior when you bring it home to the present day through Latin and Gaelic. I am a significant person, maybe a saint, or larger than life. I hear that you judge a saint by her whole personality, not just her work. I'm beginning to see my work as my shadows, less and less necessary, done with less and less care. I see my existence as similar to that of a sundial's when I simply stand, and slowly the notion of movement is suggesting itself to my consciousness and action is also appropriate in the realm of the saint, the character who begins her life in the windows of a church, in the religious air of her own imagination until history lines up with her nature, and the path becomes clear--the storms of identity erupt and implode and gather again and one of life's soldiers realizes her whole basis for living has changed and now she is impelled forward in a new film.

--the rest of "Light Warrior" and more great writing can be found at at www.eileenmyles.net.