The Militant Gardener

New Blog

2009-07-19T20:20:00.000-04:00

New Blog:

http://www.lanewatson.com

The Communication

2008-02-20T22:08:00.011-05:00


And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond
the language of the living.
                     “Little Gidding” T.S. Eliot


In my blood garden,
up the softest path
my hardy center 
lifts life like water,
holds death like warm earth
                            on a sunny day
on Sunday. Funeral spectators stand.

I do not sleep now.
“I do not sleep less,”
never-be daughter 
said, “first, lift me up
then, bury me deep 
                   build mounds, round with bone 
relics of my no-life to drunk Buddha.”

I do not sleep now.
I talk in questions.
Recite holy text
about life and grief
where no solace, 
                is offered by the dead
who must speak fluently without our words.

Never-be daughter
said, “I do live there
where splendor is lost
because of your grief
I tell you now, 
               the most beautiful life
does not exist on your death-wailing earth

where I am not real
as flowers are not
in winter’s reprieve,
a transient rest.”

Is there a date you will awake and be
a flower from my mothering sorrow?

We

2008-02-13T18:32:00.011-05:00


We laughed as children
together 
         we played
games of my childhood
in reverse, like this:

You were old, Father,
talked like a perfect
child 
      as I once was

a beautiful child,
I sat under news

of the well-informed
mind of a distant 
father 
       I have learned
the art of reading
commentaries, or
obituaries,
in reverse
           Imprint:
You were a good father.
You will make a good son.

On women (at night); Manhattan, KS

2007-09-14T04:42:00.001-04:00

Sometimes, anywhere, in transitory shadows which linger,
certain secrecies will form between a man and woman.
If you remain within these alleys with certain women,
life sometimes will remain, and it can not suffer, nor die.

Nor should it ever die in this remarkable age and town.

(every city is chaos in twilight, dark and touching;
remember the yellow and orange lights which invade night,
like angels speeding to enter the once and mythic hell,
the night which will forever and always keeps its first rule:
that all lovers will awaken and swoon.
-this is just a city, one that remembers.
forgive its endless turns and its endless round-abouts.)

We should do a very small justice to remember
its lovers, against lamp-posts, in cracks and in dimness,
eternally against black alley walls in forever white,
rubbing sex against the miniature wealthy,
in their white sophisticated collars. Or,
the dirty and remarkably strong hands, which,
more than often reach, reaching. . .
(poor servitude and poor belief should never forget.)
to forget the shuffling footsteps of commonality,
the shrugging shoulders of our spirituality,
the proud mysteries of our delicate and forgotten merchants.

macro

2007-09-14T03:46:00.000-04:00

Increase the Earth's worth. Children should never grow up and become what we are now.

And If I am sad, frail, and a little bitter, then, well, February is indeed the grayest month.

Let us, you an I, give space for the sun. It will gladly rise up in the darkest winter months. Give it room for attack in a frozen sky. Some months will freeze breath in winter, freeze life on earth; but, the Sun will make beauty in a smile, an embrace - radiation that will warm our petals.
Let no sun error in what is proven: a road to redemption, physical mortality, in a pervasive mind and languished heart; let it never freeze.

And out footsteps will run wild with the beginning of that Star exploding.

I expect this already, tomorrow; let me tell it while i am still able

2007-08-18T01:47:00.001-04:00

Expect I will want to imagine much, much, more:

I often make room for illustrious daydreams
in which I handle your superior mouth intimately.
I have already thrown your teeth to the ground
where you become a rich world beneath me-
a federation of forests, fields; the future
constructs of human development.

I expect that you will return to this world,
gullible to the green and fair,
spreading your familiarity of stars in night
and what it means for us to examine deeper.

You will return to this world to humor me;
tax my body in a field of green,
watch bluebirds search our bodies,
search the body moreover, close eyelids
and give me a fresh recollection of my purpose.

The Sun is increasing its final joke,
and death will remember us
until we finish with it and consider
that insane imagined death of Christ,
the one we all receive in the end.

I expect this already, tomorrow:
you will agree with me on a narrow street,
cover up my teardrops with a kiss,
spread your legs, swallow apologies,
sweep away fingers, release cries-
thank me for the slow thoughtfulness of my love.

daughter

2007-07-22T02:36:00.002-04:00

I imagine men, such as me, have often stagnated in future visions and promised desires for mankind. The many are abandoned for the greater glory of immortality, creating a theology out of our pure minds. But you are rested in the sacred place only a daughter or long-time Pillar of love may preside, deep in a changed man's heart. -No promise of any god or any man's Heaven rest there in me; that was given up long ago and replaced with a kinder, more gentle outlook towards Our eternity. This place is far from the youthful wanderings between good and evil, Woman and Man, daughter and father. It is universal and anticipatory, and it is the beautiful beginning of it all.
----
No Man Really Knows, but I'd like to imagine I do for you.

Positions

2007-04-18T02:32:00.001-04:00

This is where I learn to live -we all live.
Right here, tenderly in the width of our hands.
Pre-prints moving us the length of crooked thumbs,
Indicating our short and severe primordial lives.
Maybe elsewhere, behind knees we find our beginning.
-If it is kissed just so, we will unlock the mystery
of our collective and bent history.

This is where we create and dissolve. We all.
Within thighs, the art of this world is lost somehow.
There is quickness, a sudden Supernova.
Then there are other positions,
in which we point our determined bodies.
Time is plenty for stars to be born and to die;
we have only the brief moment to do the same.

This is where we learn to die, involved lips;
in our hanging mouths we trace Aquilla
with stupid tongues speaking less than courageous promises.
Perhaps we all will be cup bearers during the Sleeping Time,
Dark Star moments, when we are fragile positions in the night sky.
-Pin points for future lovers.

. . .

2007-01-29T00:53:00.001-05:00

This is a familiar story about life. This is not about exceptional talents or passions, for I believe one can find that in almost everyone, myself included. Instead, this is about exceptional difficulties or ridiculous challenges, such as a father’s death. But, perhaps none of this matters; nothing as simple as death should matter. After all, it is as apparent as the sun rising in the east and setting in the west.

Father, you are such a distant memory. Yet, nothing can solace the profound heartache of my forgetting you, often. And if often is not enough, then what absolute time can I offer. -It is not your long life I celebrate, but the death of you that raises new possibilities. Such as, a child’s soft face or the flower’s occasion in a winter’s reprieve.

And, now, I know what it is to feel alone. And I know what it is to think of you, alone. -Are soft faces or open flowers keeping you busy . . .

And, are there ever times when you forget me, often?

I watch over a house of men

2007-01-10T10:44:00.000-05:00

I watch over a house of men. These are not ordinary men. These are men whose dreams are forgotten on us all.

What do they dream about, these roosted men? Perhaps, through their faltered language they insist on quiet and pervasive dreams. Yet, their phonology and semantics fail me. For the life of me, for their life, I want to understand.

Perhaps, one remembers a picture of his mother as a child, “Big, Big woman –little, little girl. Where have you been?”
- - -

When I’m asleep, I may dream of a girl with long brown hair. Do I sleep on it by mistake? What is her name? Will the name precede mine one day? And so forth. Sometimes, these are the things I dream of when asleep in the house of extraordinary men.

You will grow old. You will be forgotten.

2007-01-01T02:26:00.001-05:00

This is mine to tell: when I’m old, I will be forgotten.

- - -

My name is not important. It hasn’t been since the Romantics. Besides, this is about you and not me. –Once, you had luxurious hair and you had love. You had a pink face, like the pink on a Valentine’s Day card.

But there are fleeting things you did in youth; such as, kiss your high school sweetheart on her deceitful lips, fall drunkenly into a stranger’s bed, or remain deep in a woman long after she abandoned you. These are the things that you did in youth, which make you old.

However, the sadness of life is there can be no sadness. In the hopes and expectations of childhood, you never had examples of love. From the beginning it was only "you shall age" and "you will experience sickness" –perhaps some sort of death. And this is all so Buddhist to you, when you just wanted to be Christian, (I agree, but this story is about you and not about me).

There is love. There is fear.

2006-06-28T13:59:00.001-04:00

There is love. There is fear. Each of its own and loneliness will absolutely ensue. Combine the two and it will lead to disaster. Such as: girls love their hair, their faces, which will launch a thousand ships, they wash their bodies in bubblegum perfumes for: (the boys that fear their father, and maybe other boys, and perhaps the strength of a girl who becomes a woman) eternal offspring.
- - -
A woman traces lines of black around her eyes. This is seduction. There is a sanguine red color to the fullness of her lips. She sprays orange perfume on her hair. Blonde, brown, black; it does not matter. There is want within the mouth reflected in the mirror.

She leaves to meet the man. When the man sees her, he will fear her.
- - -
The boy will fear her; his father has told him to conquer her. She is submissive, father said. But the boy will see her strategic smile. He will see the shadowed, cunning eyes. The hair fixed like a helmet polished to an angelic sheen. Is this the second and last coming? What light brigade?

He fears his father more and takes her. Ad majorem dei gloriam, he whispers.

it is the measure of things

2006-03-01T04:50:00.001-05:00

He likes to compare. It is the measure of things. How a woman’s hair compares fragrantly to the lemon tree in an orchard of an Abyssinian city; a place he read about. Or how the color of her eyes compare to the ocean; one he has never visited. Could hers be deep like the cold Artic, pulled by the moon into vast deepness? Perhaps pale like the Pacific, culled by the sun?

No!

He concludes that the physical step a man must take is definitely the measure of things. For example, how many steps to her front door? Is it comparable to traveling an exact distance to witness a miracle— a lost city? An ocean?

How many steps are comparable to an act of contrition— to love?

Remember; for P

2006-02-16T18:03:00.000-05:00

When we met it was winter.
I hurried myself,
my overwhelming self into her bewildered life.
Maybe it was too languid a place for me.
But I moved her, unsure
toward that greatness that is me,
but should not be me

In April, on Maiden lane
I damned my self on my porch
my heart upon my shoulder, upon her shoulder
I whispered about us.
Knowing she could not
or would not care.
But I had to move her sure.
--Whispered about greatness that is me.

A third week in May.
Our morals covered up as our bodies uncovered.
I traveled with Love’s own heart into her.
Traveled for her fruition. Tripped into her lungs,
tickled them so she would not cry.
--I made my trip.

In summer she broke with me.
She went to Chicago. Went out of me.
Pound it weak by the week,
As I tried to strongly slice my days.
Still, I thought of the greatness
Moving toward the greatness that should be me.

The Tuesday she came to me.
So beautiful to me.
Too beautiful for me.
We ate lunch;
Chewing our words secretly:
Myself, my anxiously exposed self, “No savior in me!”

Idea; birth and death

2006-02-12T18:30:00.000-05:00

There is something about giving birth to Idea,
maybe an Idea of immortality.

Idea is not theoretical or imaginary.
Nothing funny about Idea;
Idea is serious artistic business.

Idea is life: a life that needs to grow,
be fruitful, carry forth after death.

Idea the seed; bring it to Fruition.
I hope to be a grand Idea.

Oh My Love; to be continued . . .

2006-02-09T05:31:00.000-05:00

Will you tell me who my lover will be? Will she be the secret one, who kisses me behind that red brick wall, in the alley, beside the dumpster? Conceivably, she would be pretty, in a young coquettish sort of way. Tell me, will she be endowed with light hair, full sanguine lips, with eyes teeming with love for me?

You tell me who my lover will be! And I will love her immensely, like the essence that feeds that flower, there, strongly prevailing between the crack in the sidewalk. I will love her unrestrained, as the breath, here, in my waking lungs. I will love her without remorse if I can, and if not, with apology when I have not.
- - -
Tell me, who will be the lover of such a man:
I am bold and suffice it to say, sauced. I’m like a migrating sea captain without ship or home; eternally kept to land, searching the horizon for his ship, waiting faithfully to be told which one will be his to endeavor.

Connection of a different sort.

2006-02-06T23:21:00.000-05:00

There is a boy. He is on medication. This boy has no strength to conquer anything, even the father who has conquered him his last 18 years. But this boy likes oranges, (hordes them from what I know) to look at, to hold, but never to eat. He only stares blankly at the dimpled skin. Why?

There is a girl. She is on medication of a different kind. This girls does not fidget with her hair, pens and pencils, or even hair sticks and the like. This girl likes to use her hands with objects such as knives, razor blades, and other sharp instruments. Why?

-Feel the air-electric with potential collision: she whispers to him as she pulls the orange from his grip. Perhaps she explains to him how she likes to peel oranges, the delight under her fingernails (like skin), how she savors the tender meat. Above all, how she takes pleasure in squeezing the dimpled skin, feeling the sweet juice running over her hands and down into her hungry mouth.

His eyes fall to his feet, which shuffle nervously, forever in the day trying to shuffle away the abandonment, the isolation, the medication. She smiles at him, although he doesn’t see her.
There is gentle conversation between them; hers filled with delectable words, his with silent wishes and head nods. There are internal technicalities at work here that can’t answer why, so I will not ask.

-Become involved: smell the fruit as she peels the skin, releasing sweetness, slowly like her encouraging words to him. Listen as each peel falls to his once nervous feet, you will hear the slight and essential sigh of one who has been released from fruitless isolation. Watch as she divides the produce, handing him the fullness of self in a half –with affective words, with compassionate action, with such simple tender involvement in another human. He smiles.

Father: an obituary

2006-02-01T04:15:00.000-05:00

1984- My father threatened to leave the family. I was in my room as he stormed about the living room, collecting useless objects, such as the TV remote. He looked at me and told me that he would come back for me. He would not let me go with him, and I went to bed sorry I was ever born. The next morning, a Saturday, father came in as I was eating cereal and watching cartoons. He was tired and unshaven, wearing the same clothes as the night before. Everyone was still asleep from the long night before. Father stood in the door, in the early morning bright sunlight, both of us staring at one another in understanding –his from age and mine from innate feelings. I was to learn at that moment what capitulation looked like. I saw it in his face, a man not destined to have a family, not to be tied down to one woman or one town. I could see in his dark native eyes a man not meant to be a father to a sensitive son. I got up spilling cereal and hugged him, welcoming him back to our home. He smiled, rubbing my thick hair and handed me the remote. I flipped channels as he went to sleep in the bedroom of endless apologies.

1990- You are old father! This breaks my heart to contemplate. I can only conceive you as the fallen Colossus. I consider you crumbled into shards, a bulking leg there, a clenched fist beside, all of you lost beneath the watery memories of both our youths, your body worn slowly away, your mind wrapped in the mushy green haze of your thoughts, thoughts cut from the light of the sun, far and deep beneath.

1998- I go to visit my father in prison. He has been transferred from Pennsylvania to South Carolina and is closer now. It is the summer and humid, and I shiver from sorrow. I arrive in the waiting room of the prison, waiting for my father to appear. Prisoners come in to see their family members. There is no sight of him coming in, so I scan the room, looking at all the people and their hushed conversations; there is an old prisoner with no hair in the far corner by the door. I feel sorry for him, feeling what it feels to be alone, no one for a dejected man. The old prisoner turns and looks in my direction and I at him. It is my father and I wave at him to come over.
“Do I know you?” He asks.
“You are old father. You talk like a child. It’s me, your son.”
Although his mind is old, his physical shape is good. He looks as if he bench-presses an extreme amount of weights. Later, after we eat, my seventy-five year old father tells me he is bench-pressing 300 pounds every morning. I do not recognize the man in front of me, nor does he recognize the man I have become.
I leave him, he waving at me; waving like a father from the front door of his house to a son leaving for college. This old man has bars on the door to protect others.

2002- I see my father when I visit him in a few years after he has gotten out of prison. This is what I witness: he has the essential heart conditions of a seventy-nine year-old. He is an old man of native leathery skin, with brown eyes searching and wondering what God, if any, will greet him: Cherokee or White? There are dark purple veins tracing along his arms, bulking globules under his skin; veins that remind me of a cold river, pooling, forever pooling until they will pool and overflow. Rivers will overflow when the banks have given away . . . overflow from his heart into his lungs, into kidneys, into his brain. He has all of the possibilities of his arteries splitting, snapping, or wearing away at anytime. His body is dried, brittle, lacking luster, almost it seems, hard to my tender touch. He is not the warrior I have always known. He is dying slowly, dying cruelly for the man he is. He and I both wished he could die a warrior’s death. I look at him, a cracked and crumbling colossus, and envision when he dies, people will come to me and say, “Your father is dead.” I will look at them confused and remember my remarkably marked childhood and then thank them.
- - -
I have been to the edge of his world, and he has always taken me to the next ledge of falseness. I was the boy who sat in the imprint of his heart, the insignificant correction of the editorial. The boy who sat under the newspaper, looking to him, and him seeing the paper instead. -I have learned the art of reading social commentaries in reverse. Perhaps I was lost on him as much as the 6th page obituaries. A splendid and colorful son covered arbitrarily by black print. -Under the recliner, at your footstep . . . under the footstep of your recliner. I was the boy who played with match-cars under the insensibly well-informed mind of a distant father.
- - -
December 7, 2004- There is death and there is re-birth. You were a good father. You will be a good son.

The Sky Between a Pale Existence and a Wild Heart

2006-01-25T20:50:00.000-05:00

Portland bodies are pale and mild. Mild bodies need milk and honey—reduced in heat—drink and let it overflow from your mouth, your heart.

- - -

When the sun radiates through the grey here, it might be delightful to devour something sweet and tangy, pull and tug with teeth, rub the frosting from lips, smile.

- - -

There is sweet desire: a young lover feasting on her pale thighs. There is bitter yearning: a promise of such an act. How to choose? Both fill the gap between a passive, pale existence and a wild, honeyed heart.

Smithereen McClure in Portland

2006-01-06T02:50:00.000-05:00

Smithereen paces back and forth, stopping to glance at the picture of the woman on the mantle. She is young, with long dark black hair, her lips sanguine and living. Every so often he will stop and hold the framed picture. He traces the face of the picture with his thumb and forefinger then rests the picture face down. This is Smithereen’s wife, Adele.
She left him several months ago to “find” herself on the west coast. First in San Francisco, and when that didn’t work for her artistic and spiritual pursuits, she hopped a train to Portland.
“Portland?”
“Yes,” she said, “I think it holds the key to love and longevity.
“What does that mean?
“It means,” she chastised, “it’s the perfect creative energy field.” There was a silence in the line, and he thought they lost a connection, then, “it holds a mystic power.” She whispered the last word.
“So do I.”
She laughed pleasingly and told him she loved him. That was the last time he heard his wife. Adele laugh so freely. It was also the last time he heard from her again.

The doorbell interrupts his pacing. It is the cab, he thinks, but when he answers the door there is no one there. He steps out on the porch to see both ways and steps on the corner of a book that has been laid there. He reaches down quickly and picks it up. “Visit Portland” is blazoned across the top —a cruel joke, no doubt. There is a honk from the cab he called earlier; he motions to the driver that he’ll be right back.
Smithereen enters the room and regards it like a stranger. He walks around as if he has seen it for the first time. Countering this feeling, he moves to the mantle and holds himself pious in front of it, stares at the downward picture, decides to turns it up. At once the room feels familiar and warm, and alive. He waits, closes his eyes, wishing her beside him and when it is not realized he lets out a sigh and slowly pulls his things together, suitcases and such. Reaching for the picture, he pauses; thinking I know what she looks like. Known it all my life. He leaves in no great hurry, lingering as if this is his last sanctuary, his last sacred place of refuge.

Places In Which I Dream

2005-12-22T19:23:00.000-05:00

These moist lands, haze with forgetfulness. Daytime is like dusk, everyday slumbering grey with someone’s immediate drunkenness towards abandon. Where is my father? This is not his land. He was baked in his brown and dusty home of Okalahoma. His people cleared dried and caked sorrow from their mouths, to utter powerful and mysterious words that would release them from their captivity.
No, this must be my mother’s land, more like it, emerald isles, where, too, they drink to die, for a while. Is this the place I belong, on her side?

Port, land too lush with life, the seizing of a young man’s ideas. Me caught in a battle between the ocean and mountain. This is the land where the living come to be buried in a grey season for a thorough war of dreariness.
---
Portland, you green, lush whore, something to be recognized in my own bed! Quit me, or I you, before I take the living to my father’s land.

Portland

2005-12-13T15:09:00.000-05:00

He is here, and it is raining. It is Portland. He begins sadly with his protrusile lips to tell me about his yesterday, (in the rain, it is the saddest time to tell a story of a life); on these moist days he will look at me, indicate the dark sky and say, “We need oxygen to breathe. But only when you think about it.”

I am in Kansas City

2005-11-28T02:01:00.000-05:00

I am in Kansas City. Kansas City is a place. A long drawn-out kind of place with no purpose to me. It breeds a hatred of unrestrained ventures. This place! This place collapses my comforted spirit. I am no Lewis and Clark. I do not wish to find new corridors to new ideas. Give me my solitude, in a known idea, about a large and known city. Let me walk with a well rehearsed map, traversing its signs, along numbered streets, in search of a deeply referenced corner store, or dilapidated theatre, the stage collapsing under the weight of decade or more players. (I will have purpose then, touch a cleft here, a chip there, the known will be turned anew.) Let me visit these known places, huddled massively together, claustrophobically so. There, will raise in me a new spirit, seeking and touching things not known. I will be shocked into a sense of foreboding and immense pleasure—it will be undesirable among the adventurer, the visionary, as well as the go-between.

they talk of love . . .

2005-11-21T23:37:00.000-05:00

They talk of love. They talk of death. To him, both are the same. Not as a suggestion—more like Sansara—for transformation, moving to the next level, or dying to a younger, more uncertain idea bred in his youth. She burns incense; it moves on air, for their souls' craving rumination. They make love in youth.
- - -
It is only the dead that seem exempt from love.

Just a thought.

2005-11-15T20:05:00.000-05:00

There will be a day when we reminisce:
We were artists, wearing black
Creating originals, creating anew, even stylishly so.
We will pause for our probable glory
Between the licking of chicken juice from fingers; and think,
“We are the new Gogol and Satre!”
Then one of us will say something psuedo-profound,
Perhaps he will begin to choke and maybe die,
the other will be too afraid, too egocentric to give a pat on the back.
--Another pseudo-artist will be buried in an unpublished grave.

It was far more important to wear Banana Republic,
than to write about it.