Work often conceals as much as it reveals. This is true whether the work is made by the corporation, at the construction site, in the art studio, or on the page, in writing. The metaphor is the great human hiding place. The poet stores nuts in poems buried in clay pots. Reading is an anthropological dig. A writer often spends as much time working on what to cut or shut out as what to include, to hold within. Readers are seduced by hidden artifacts, by craft and handiwork, also through secrets, gossip, whispers, and shadows. Can the writer trust the reader? Can the reader trust the writer? Writers have the advantage, since they can hide behind the narrator, while the narrator may hide within the story. The narrator may provide a voice-over. There may be other voices.
“A Shadow in Yucatan,” by Philippa Rees, begins with a secret that Stephanie, the protagonist, won’t be able to keep for long. She lives in Florida, calls her mother in Brooklyn, and explains her predicament, asking for help. Abortion is an existential question for the community, but it comes down to an existential question for two, Stephanie and her child. The theme of shame falls with its wet curtain, but Stephanie transcends the community’s efforts to use shame to control her decision. Who or what is the antagonist?
The writing in “A Shadow in Yucatan” is experimental and mesmerizing, experimental because it wrestles simultaneously with both what should be told, when, what kept hidden, and how the story should be told, mesmerizing because the language seems to have been distilled, its poetic form and novella length (divided into two parts and 21 chapters over 109 pages illustrated with 31 black and white photographs) resulting in a potent mixture of page turning pleasure. This is a book the reader falls into. I read the hard copy, having started with an e-edition, and the reading experience is simply different with the hard copy, more satisfying, both the text and the photographs, though there are of course the advantages of e-editions to readers who prefer them. But somehow, with the hard copy in hand, I could better hear the cadence and symmetry of the sentence structure, see the overall layout of the short chapters, hear the strategy of different voices, understand the purpose of the use of italics throughout, appreciate the fall of the black and white photographs, almost all suggesting something hidden as much as something shown.
Stephanie works in a beauty salon, where her story opens and closes in the symmetry of everyday conversation infused with irony; everyone seems to know something someone else does not, but all the knowing is connected. And of course a beauty salon is where people go to prepare a hidden course of action, to prepare hair and face and nails to improve circulation in the community. The tones of sarcasm and irony that shade Part One give way to a slight risk of sentimentalism in Part Two that is quickly washed away by inflexible socio-economic demographic persistence, where the demographic form is the child’s story, a nursery rhyme, told with the cadence of a lullaby interrupted by an inscrutable language only those properly initiated comprehend. Stephanie is a member of several communities throughout the book, and the nonjudgmental Miriam is something of a “smithy” of an angel.
I very much enjoyed reading this patiently crafted book. The form and content (the how and what) are perfectly blended. The writing is clear and concise, the diction carefully wrought, the sentence structure always varied and interesting, the dialog compelling, the text artistically cast and purposefully divided to invite reading. The dominant impression is of a sculpture, because what could have been a huge novel has been pared down to its essential shape, but the novel is still there, at once exposed and hidden.
Note: The slide show at the top of this post contains photos from my collection. These photos are not connected to Philippa’s book except through the theme of something hidden.
Scamble: I met a comma at the bus stop this morning. … Did you hear what I said? I said, I met a comma, at the bus stop, this morning.
Cramble: Be wary of commas. They’ll be on you like fleas.
-Did you know the apostrophe is the feminine form of comma?
-Band of punctuation pirates, the lot of them. Some witch of an exclamation point once hexed me into a pair of parentheses.
-Yes, life is hard enough without being labeled a parenthetical expression.
-Imagine impossible to break away from the vice grip of your parents.
-The bus stop comma seemed a cool enough little fellow.
-What was he up to?
-Just pausing, to say hello.
-I once dated an apostrophe, a beach volleyball aficionado, as I recall.
-Cool comma wasn’t going to the end of the line, Line 15, though, where the periods have apparently gentrified the neighborhood, the so-called Pearl District.
-No more comma splices. A few fragments, still.
-What’s the point of periods, anyway? We never really stop we get up and go again. He got off at the very next stop, the cool comma did.
-Why I prefer the express bus no all of that stop and go busyness biz.
Abducted by alien cats from outer space and whisked away to a faraway planet then shot back to Earth from a circus cannon cocked with physicist rubber string theory, a cat cannonball, Scamble tries to interest Cramble in a tabloid worthy extraterrestrial tale!
Cramble: [Silence]
Scamble: “And you have nothing to say?!”
Cramble: “Does this have something to do with my recent cloture motion?”
Scamble: “No! The cat planet is called Mkgnao!9. It’s all bushes and trees, birds and fish, and dunes of kitty litter. It’s a cat’s paradise. Everyone there is a hep cat!”
Cramble: “If all are hep, none is hep.”
Scamble: “Nonetheless, no matter what radio station you play, Mantovani! The planet is lush with the sounds of birds and strings and bugs flirting about hither and thither and streams of white wine full of fish on the lark. I’m thinking of moving to Mkgnao!9. Do you want to go with me?”
Cramble: “Sounds too good to be true. What’s the catch? I’ll bet there’s a downside.”
Scamble: “Their oceans are filling with used kitty litter.”
Cramble: “Making it difficult to know how to pack. In any case, how will you get back to Mkgnao!9 if the hep space cats don’t come pick you up again?”
Scamble: “Silence, Exile, and Cunning.”
Cramble: “Here you go with that James Joyce cheap cheat imitation literary allusion stuff again. Anyway, I don’t get the connection.”
Scamble: “Joyce is the patron saint of cats up on Mkgnao!9.”
Cramble: “Lucky Jim.”
Scamble: “I’m going to write a memoir about my Mkgnao!9 experience!”
Cramble: “Sounds wild. I’ve heard the memoir form is popular these days. I was thinking of writing one, but I can’t seem to get past chapter one, “Begot to Nap.” But why don’t you create something new? Wasn’t that the gist of Joyce’s gig, to repair in the garage of his brain the broken bicycle of his island, rally the folks to a new way of riding, or words to that effect?”
Scamble: “I just did!”
Cramble: “Did what?”
Scamble: “Create something new!”
Cramble: “What?”
Scamble: “Mkgnao!9!”
Cramble: “It’s a good thing the id is kept out of sight.”
Questions Before Going Out: Scamble – I’m in here! Are you going to wear that tie with that shirt? What time does the bus come? Do I have time to paint my nails? Do you think any mice will be at the party? Did Jack and Esme find a kittysitter? Have you seen my claw sharpener? Can you change the litter before we leave? I love coming home to a clean litter box. Did you notice how I put that in the affirmative? Cramble: Do I have time for a nap?
The most deviant of poets stops writing poetry, like Rimbaud, or tries to change the game, like Nicanor Parra, whose “Anti-poems” must contain the seeds of their own destruction. If poetry is already anti-language, what is an anti-poem? Deviant < Latin: “a turning out of the way.” To turn away from, as great musicians may turn away from their instruments once they feel the deviancy they introduced has been assimilated. What is assimilated is no longer anti-anything, doesn’t sound new anymore, or has become such a part of the din it has lost its resonance.
Poets see something the rest of us may see but call it something else. This is deviant behavior, the web of a spider on hallucinogens, but why must it also be someone’s head aflame in the fall?
We might look forward to an anti-essay, an anti-novel, an anti-comics. The ultimate anti-work can’t be read by anyone, including its author. It’s born a mystery.
Intro. to Fragments: Journals claiming they are open to all forms of poetry, but follow with, but make sure you read us to see that you fit. Fit what? Can’t deviate from deviancy, what use is it? Well, but as a group, deviating from all this other stuff. What other stuff? Other forms? Other voices, other rooms. What room? You know, the one “where the women come and go, Talking of Michelangelo.”
In grammar school, the Sisters of Mercy taught us to syllabicate antidisestablishmentarianism. At the time, we thought it the longest word in English, and we learned to say it, touch it, feel it, but no one knew what it meant. There was no Wiki where we could look it up. On a dare, Laurel Hurst stole a glance at Sister Maryquill’s desktop dictionary. He returned, his knuckles raw from a ruler, and rumored it all came down to the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. By high school, Laurel would become an anti-disestablishmentprotestpoet, haunted by the postmodern “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.” Deluxe words. I’ll take a chocolate malt, fries in a basket, and a cheesepoem deluxe.
Since a reasonable reader’s expectation or assumption is that any given poem may confound, confuse, or obfuscate, referencing some arcane or esoteric or privileged knowledge or experience about how words or ideas work, any given poem that does not do these things might look like anti-fit to a poetry critic, but will it be an anti-poem? What would an anti-poem look like? A poem that aspires to middle class respectability will like water seek its own level. Poetry needs the middle class, but the middle class does not need poetry. If it did, we’d see Poetry next to People at the drugstore checkout stand. But we get our poetry where we find it: Fishwrap.
What would an anti-essay read like? What would an anti-photograph look like? Or an anti-speech sound like? Is the anti-form always mistaken for satire or cartoon? Aesthetic standards of the neighborhood. The propaganda of advertising. Deceitful come-ons. Pathos. What’s the point of saying something virtually everyone will agree with? Those churches are empty most of the time. Who moved my assumption?
Consider Queen Mob’s TeaHouse, where you can read movie reviews by reviewers who have not seen the movie; this is theory uncrated from the academy, both feet off the ground. Alt, alt, mea maxima alt. Eliot: “…like a patient etherized….” Toto, I don’t think we’re in the Victorian Age anymore. Irony, satire, and sarcasm tools of the modernist trade. What’s the difference between an idea and ideology?
Biespiel in his post-rant and Dylan in his address are saying something similar when it comes to a moral evaluation of the use of language as art. Dylan sums it up with the quote he references from Sam Cooke:
“Sam Cooke [Dylan said] said this when told he had a beautiful voice: He said, ‘Well that’s very kind of you, but voices ought not to be measured by how pretty they are. Instead they matter only if they convince you that they are telling the truth.’ Think about that the next time you [inaudible].”
Hermione Lee’s recent Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life occasioned a number of reviews in the usual places. Most touched on the questions of how did Penelope do it (the uncanny way she cleans up the mess by throwing out the novelistic clutter extraneous to her enriched needs, leaving almost every sentient sentence embering in its own mystery), and when did Penelope do it (she did not write and publish her first novel until around age 60). Writing and publishing a novel are two different activities. Writing one at any age seems unremarkable; publishing one, at any age, may be. Readers often gawk and might wonder if Penelope was a so-called “late bloomer.” But the flower seduced into blooming too early may come to regret a late frost. In any case, there is little evidence that Penelope was a late bloomer. Her writing seems set in her past. The novels are reflections, reconsiderations of experience, of a life rooted in the mutation and gestation of failure. Failure, like slapstick, can be funny in a way success can never be, but only a writer bloomed wise (rather than, say, embittered) from omission will get this. Slapstick, too, is found where the waves of success (swells that break in a timely manner) dissipate on the strand of a listless audience.
The narrator of a Penelope novel, always in third person, tells only what she wants to when she’s good and ready, often slipping very close to first person in what James Wood calls “free indirect style,” but might pull back and mention a year, not all that useful a piece of information, actually, considering 1960 aboard a barge on the Thames hardly suggests an environment the same as 1960 up from the Strand at El Porto, except that later it might help explain a question of whether or not television was invented yet or were the characters too poor or too bohemian to own one, and one begins to see the ship of one’s own home going down in a domestic storm just as easily on 44th in El Porto as on the Thames in London. Domestic themes are at once both universal and local; what matters is both what is said and how it is said. One doesn’t navigate one’s way through domestic turmoil following some staid rubric or outline; one lives through the hullabaloo and just maybe survives alone to tell the tale. And you must tell it as it happened, full of confusion and doubt about what might come next, wind always full in the sails, or might have happened, if someone, anyone, had their hand, even once in a while, on the tiller.
Of the reviews of Lee’s Life I reviewed, I’ll only mention a few: Caleb Crain in Harpers, “Her Struggle: The reticence of Penelope Fitzgerald” (which I saw note of on his blog but had to renew my lapsed subscription to Harpers to see, only to be thwarted by a six week delay before my first issue arrived, which by then was the next month’s; no matter, by then, impatient, I was able to read Caleb’s review on-line, having gained re-admittance via subscription to go behind the Harper’s pay wall – you need a hand stamp); James Wood in The New Yorker, “Late Bloom”; Alexander Chee in Slate, “The Lady Vanished”; and Levi Stahl, on I’ve Been Reading Lately, “Penelope Fitzgerald’s notebooks.” I mention Caleb’s review because he waited until 46 to write and publish his first novel (following a novella published in n+1 and a number of non-fiction works, including articles, book, and blog); is Caleb a late bloomer? Of course not, but it’s interesting that the setting of Caleb’s Necessary Errors, like most of Penelope’s, occurs decades ahead of its writing and publication. Doesn’t wine aged twenty years taste different from the day it was bottled? Some writers are everblooming. Alexander Chee mentions not just the idea of the late bloomer but recounts the actual critical reaction to Penelope’s success that at the time combined skepticism with derision, as if to have arrived late and wearing a housedress provided adequate support for the claim unprolific oldster can’t write or she would have by now. And Levi Stahl’s review is interesting because it references an earlier review he wrote of Penelope’s The Afterlife, a collection of her non-fiction articles, and on the strength of his review, I picked up a copy and quickly saw that this whole late blooming explanation of anything is a dodge. The clue to understanding Penelope might have something to do with knowledge of patience, as this comment, from Bridget Read’s Paris Review “How She Knows,” explains:
“It is vital to emphasize that Fitzgerald’s novels were not achieved in spite of her domestic life; they were borne directly out of it. Her work is radical in that it suggests that, in fact, a feminine experience, a liminal experience, might be better equipped than a male one to address the contradictions of human existence taken up by the greatest literature.”
Levi Stahl’s review was of Penelope’s notebooks, and he quotes Penelope saying:
“I am drawn to people who seem to have been born defeated or, even, profoundly lost.”
It’s possible that Penelope’s testimony, expressed in her novels, belies even her most perceptive reviewers: did she not feel herself, during all those years of veritable single motherhood and low rung jobs thanks in large part to the miscreant missing husband – did she never feel neither beat nor no direction home?
I am reminded here of Daisy from Penelope’s The Gate of Angels. Maybe Daisy wasn’t born defeated, but loss came nevertheless, which perhaps makes things even worse, for if one is not born defeated, one may not have the skills necessary for sane survival (wit and sense of humor, irony, empathy, honesty, ability to pack quickly and travel light) yet Daisy, in so many ways, never seems either defeated or lost. Even when she is actually lost, as in without a map, she manages to find a way out of that lostness. And of course the lone woman going astray into the for-males-only cloistered arena of Fred’s college is hilarious with irony. Daisy, for her obvious suffering, is existentially happy, the most telling characteristic of her personality, upon her like a birthmark, that she finds it easier to give than to take, to provide for than to ask from.
This sense of being born lost, though, surely is gender neutral, but to find oneself lost with children in tow is a condition most often reserved for women. Reading Penelope, I am reminded of both Stevie Smith and Clarice Lispector, Stevie for humor, Clarice for a style of omission, and both for a hold on the occult. While I was reading The Bookshop, which employs a poltergeist, coincidentally Susan informed me a squirrel had taken up residence in an eve recently slightly opened by ice damage to a fascia board of our old house. I argued, since we had not actually seen the squirrel, that it could be a poltergeist. But Susan said, no, because the squirrel only made noise in the early morning, just before dawn, whereas a poltergeist prefers the hour just after you’ve fallen asleep.
What else characterizes the style of Penelope’s short novels? The narrator often comments on the behavior of characters as if there are three parties at play at once: the character, the narrator, and the author. While to some readers, this may seem like a loose grip on point of view, it’s actually a way of condensing and rotating observation, like with a kaleidoscope. The action is close in, the distant details of world news obviously irrelevant. The focus is on detail – if things seem vague, it’s not for lack of detail, description, or dialog that reveals character. Character as Chaplinesque cog, subject to naturalistic randomness. Free indirect style, with the narrator making evaluative, reflective, and analytical comments, as if claims made may indeed be challenged, though of course there will be no reply. Still, almost everything continually on the go, or on the move, coming, as it were, as surprise. But isn’t that the nature of the domestic, which cannot be domesticated?
So, I’ve read so far, of Penelope novels, in this order, as they came up in library queue: Offshore, my favorite I suppose for its setting of water and boats and mix of characters major and minor as well as the unexpected turns; At Freddie’s, again, a mix of young and old characters, age sometimes having little to do with maturity, and Freddie’s is how all schools should work; The Bookshop, atmosphere so strong you can smell the water and the books and hear the poltergeist and the cash machine; The Golden Child, bit of a mystery this one, though they all contain something of that genre; The Gate of Angels, again, while the plot is dated in a specific time zone, it hardly seems relevant in the sense the characters and their predicaments could be playing out even as we read. And I’m opened now to Human Voices. Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I started Innocence, but did not finish it. I had read about a third of it when I nonetheless had to admit that I couldn’t get my ear around it. I think something of the “historical novel” angle and too much of the fairy tale got in my way. Maybe I’ll go back to it some day. It’s often I pick up an old favorite book and wonder, how did I ever find this enjoyable? Likewise, I might pick up a book I long ago was unable to get into, and wonder, how could I not have appreciated this? Maybe I’ll have to wait until I turn 60, a late blooming reader. Meantime, I’ve also put Hermione Lee’s biography of Penelope Fitzgerald in the queue.
Two Hep Cats and the UFODid you happen to see a UFO in the backyard last night? No. No UFO’s on my watch. You see some strange things in Joe’s backyard some nights. You were probably just imagining things. What was it like? It looked like it was trying to suck the litter out of my litter box. Dreadful. Yeah. Scary stuff. Be wary. Ever vigilant!Odd, though. I thought I saw a UFO hovering over my kitty litter box. What did you do? I hissed. And the UFO? It flew off, as quiet as a bird, and a fog descended. I think you’ve been reading too much poetry. Possibly.You thought I was just joking around?
300 This our endus now loops our open
299 Fall far below, leap over, gambol
298 Careful of grinning Grendels
297 Trolling erasures, elite elides, slow spindles
296 Check under bed and closet before sleep
295 Fear not these claw dark deep
294 Divertissements that ballet
293 Like games of crooked croquet
292 Changing rules as quickly as played
291 Which wicked witch of them
290 Twisted the meme of please
289 Sordid sorcerers in putrid pits
288 Filling upside-down mouths with salt
287 Redacted and redressed in uniform
286 Theatre ushers marching down aisles
285 Espousing enhanced punctum bias
284 Punctuated torts by loco pilot ghost lamp
283 Misfortune’s cunning smile
282 Chained he was to a thorny bush
281 A fire which would not burn
280 In a land of milk and honey tubas and butter
279 Stirred with dollar tallboys
278 Who did a good job revising until all
277 Edited for good PR
276 Like Torquemada the Grand Inquisitor
275 Asking greedy questions no answers satisfy
274 An open hand flat smacks a desk
273 With a question
272 Yes of course it’s why we’re all here
271 About these numbers
270 Each line coded
269 Beginning with 300
268 Moving backwards down to 1
267 To make suspect the lines trouble
266 Can be read up or down vertically
265 Top to bottom or upside-down
264 Or begin on any line in touch
263 Lag a coin upon a line
262 Hopscotch up and down
261 Any pause-positional phrase
260 Allows tracking and trending
259 Where each line presents
258 Measured headway phrenological proof
257 Human nature has not improved
256 In spite of pills and e-gizmo devices
255 Echoing down our hours
254 Speaking of numbers and rhymes
253 He said he was not a party to wit
252 He’d seen better times
251 He danced he sang he twisted
250 In bed pan pain
249 He’ll tell you another thing
248 About this throb and swing
247 How machines must go on clicking
246 Up or down
245 Just so no one falls too fast
244 Goes with subjects trending
243 Each line then fixed
242 In time by dovetail coordinate
241 Number rhyme logos pathos and ethos
240 So readers can shuttle and bounce
239 In and out of these digressions
238 Where we were when were we
237 Oh, yes, Line 275, Q&A
236 About to address
235 Rebuttals, opposing viewpoints
234 Handles in the hold of winter argument
233 Sick of scald cold move quick to summer
232 Surf seen from silence of dunes
231 Where two true blue lovers walk
230 The ice plant garden full
229 Soft flutters, breeze of roses
228 Red petals dropping into sea
227 With flop swish white waves wash
226 Through the quiet blue dunes
225 Where plum flowers float in the air
224 Drizzle down aswoon in color
223 Brimming on curly burled branches
222 Wilting immortally
221 Into plum flower dew
220 Booming shore pound in the distance
219 While in the backyard chess games play
218 And Gnip gnop, gnip gnop, gnip gnop and
217 Baseball, sitting quietly talking
216 The father, Cactus, poking
215 The mother, Twisted Cypress Shadow,
214 Alone on a hill in sensational California
213 The sun cooling off behind them
212 Tendril circles grape the overgrown yard
211 Where kids run to tatters
210 Breezes sprinkle Muscat dust
209 Arms and legs
208 Light up like firecrackers
207 Off they go! Off they go! Off they go!
206 Around and then and than this and that
205 When they stop no one will know
204 The kids dance until the moon glow
203 Soothes their sunburned toes
202 Sleep beneath scrubby oak trees
201 Across the sandy tan foothills inland
200 Near Meone, Jockson, Cutter Creek
199 Wettown below the melted mine
198 The yellow hills of old rust rush country
197 An orange must buries cast aside graves
196 Panning for nuggets off the cliffs of Meone
195 Outside the tavern
194 Where four women sit talking, patiently waiting
193 Wreathed with lavender and rosemary sprigs
192 Vitis californica
191 Four men come forth from the bar
190 Little prairie oysters swelling
189 Following one another out the pub
187 Need ride can’t drive you reading then ready for what
186 Like sheep and shamed they all were too
185 A few pints and darts at the bloody pub
184 A red hot game they all thinking go now for a goal
183 Tupping and that one was naked shorn head
182 Coat he forgot in the cab the little lost lamb
181 A couple of pinks and he would think himself lucky
180 She would if her Leo came home growling
179 Grabbing at her nape punch his lights out
178 And what when he’s not drinking he’s napping
177 Comes licking and purring he does
176 But he knows she means business
175 Imagine that poundage going at you forty times a day
174 Him scaring the bejeezus out of the little ones
173 With his botched teeth horrid breath and moody books
172 Bloody ignorant tongue drooling from his mouth
171 How much did he drink as if he could remember
170 Walking on his knuckles hunkered all thick brow lost eyes
169 You’ll catch your death of pneumonia
168 She told him he was actually in the gutter
167 Oh my god yes in the muddy scummy gutter the snipe
166 Scooted by his sweatshirt covered in cake she jumped
165 Moving slowly toward his prey the domesticated cat
164 His huge orange head lunging his lion ears
163 Accruing all that sounds like dust
162 The one with the long tooth stood on his hind legs wobbling
161 Warbling and pounding his chest falling into a deep fit
160 Coughing and choking and falling all over her
159 Hog boring slipping and suckling into the mud
158 Root for what for a cold carrot or radish she took
157 Some muck to dip it in jay suds they ought to
156 Shut that place down for the good it does anyone
155 Four housemen of the cover-up
154 The bum with his rhetorical situation
153 Punctuated equilibrium audience
152 Faces in the occupying crowd
151 A hem for a hat, a this for a that
150 Trade and barter, deceive and trick
149 For a bite for a ride
148 Take all of it all the wave the foam
147 Rye knot kneaded loaf laze and loll
146 A penny a line for a true one, half price otherwise
145 Who thought to make copies
144 Some greedy scholarly degreed griot
143 A self word-made bard
142 The verdure wort
141 In the rise of the root
140 She’s getting ahead of herself
139 Nowhere near the start or finish
138 Some swelling by the wayside
137 Some rappelling down on the face of it
136 Some scaling mixing a podium
135 In each line a toehold though explicating
134 Some hanging, still, resting on their exegeses
133 Reading solo rock climbing
132 Into the pleasant roped pipes
131 Don’t look so absurdly cold
130 Pour hot lead, drink salt water
129 Ale’s gone sour, grass dried frizzy
128 One man’s ears another’s kazoos
127 She hates it when people do her like that
126 Not too much around here mama don’t allow
125 Eating pig’s knuckles with sauerkraut and malt
124 The air clear and a rich flourish of waves foaming
123 Over beakers, the sand berms brushed smooth
122 Nightlong offshore blow, calm now
121 The wave surface rigid glass
120 The whole scene as clean as an experiment
119 The thunder of the closed out barrels
118 At the end of the pier past the break over the swells
117 A rush of fish smell mixing with surge and smoke
116 Bunsen burner to keep the fisher warm
115 The clock above the bait shop points up and down
114 Below the pier the swells emerge from deep water
113 A hooded wine the swell’s slow purr
112 An outlier swell appears bullish reaches
111 A clapping point and a seagull flaps off
110 Spontaneous symmetry breaking
109 Flying up to the pier alights atop the clock
108 One surfer predicts another and at sunrise
107 More surfers appear and at noon
106 Flocking to the south side of the pier
105 There are more surfers than can be accurately counted
104 Entering the waves random wanton
103 They disappear under the rushing foam of the inside
102 Breaking waves and emerge laughing and paddling
101 To reach the swells outside the break
100 One waves to another, they look up and wave at the fisher
99 Who waves back, entangled in the waves
98 Of nothing missed passing between them
97 The pier trail fails ahead
96 Across an ocean of chaos
95 A test which will not be measured
94 A failed word wrongful malediction
93 Only in so far as language goes
92 The wave performation syntax repeats
91 With a constant rote result, and that’s something
90 At the end of the pier there appear two solutions possible
89 Combining polymorphously into a molecule of nonsense
88 The ocean empties of meaning permitting accidents
87 Smoking and drinking joints
86 Below the jetty on the south side
85 Sea wrack and brine gulls down
84 Broken sand dollars
83 A beachcomber for miles
82 Pockets full of shells and small rocks
81 At the end of the pier at the end of the roundabout
80 A plank, in the shape of an h
79 The fisher walks out with gaffe
78 To aid in landing an unusually large catch
77 A halibut, a barracuda
76 Bait bucket alive with bubbles
75 The waves split around the pilings
74 The fisher walks out onto the h plank
73 Something jumps in a rush to the water
72 Disappearing into the slushy grey soup
71 Waxing waves scouring the beach
70 Leaving the pier to its sleepy creepy decay
69 While the ocean supreme creams
68 Barnacle covered pilings
67 All that muscled beach
66 At the end of the railway crossing
65 Old men wizened as raisins stuck on the strand
64 The wiriest of them fingerpicks a guitar
63 The only other sound the wheeze
62 The tavern door spins
61 As to the tap they go
60 The women rocking to and fro
59 As if on a boat putting out to sea
58 And then went down to the pub in shifts
57 Factories now running night and day
56 Knitting and crocheting
55 An assortment of needles and pins
54 It’s an old yarn an old man’s tale
53 The homonym got the best of him
52 His reflection in the salt water
51 As he fell to pay his visit
50 The year the waves broke over the pier
49 Surely an end was near
48 400 blows and the sea divested
47 The year of the great flood
46 The land sinking easily away from the sailor
45 40 worried days and 40 sleepless nights
44 Wood filled would the old tug hold
43 The oxpecker kept watch while the rhinoceros slept
42 The old books would serve as ballast
41 On the deck he built an altar
40 Which worried his wife
39 Later in life
38 Fish appear in her sea
37 Little wheels of fog reeling out of the water
36 A bead of sweat on his brow
35 Somewhere during the rosary
34 The rummy one
33 Sticks out his tongue
32 Ad libitum
31 Ad lib scat
30 Noise
29 Into silence
28 All this sand, ashes
27 Out of the moonlit water
26 Comes a procession up the beach
25 Rings and in vestments weary
24 Music, erratic mutable jazz
23 Haloes his balding plate
22 A host the size of a deluxe
21 Where the surfers eat and drink
20 Fish burritos and beer at Serena’s Seafood
19 It’s too late now to stop
18 They keep after these questions
17 He knows the answer but waits
16 Waves closing in closing out
15 Leaks reveal nothing
14 Later he’ll call the plumber
13 Taps pipes lightly with ball-ping hammer
12 The night sinks stink
11 Reveille revelry diesel bus starts up
10 Still dark draft out of the water
9 Bags the grounds for the morning
8 Barista in a long green beard
7 Two cappuccinos with foamy angel wings
6 Dodge into a coffee house dive
5 A couple of horned larks warbling across Eden
4 Blinding flashes in camera obscura
3 Paparazzi at the Gates of Paradise
2 One was never enough
1 In the beginning was the wand and wave
The Coming of the Toads 