Whose woods these are I think I know

Today I am thinking of lovers & love & of all the power we ascribe to a notion we understand so little of. What does it mean even, to understand an emotion? Why do so many people want to "understand" art, mumbling, "I don't get it," when encountering contradiction? Isn't love so much like art? Does not the artist (by which I mean poet, painter, sculptor, dancer, etc) pour love and rage and confusion into their work, isn't all of it collage? How could we assume to understand the source, and then, again, what is it about understanding that's so valued in our culture?

One of my favorite poems has always been Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." When I was a child, my father recited the poem from memory so many times to me, at the most unlikely moments, that it has been beautifully burned into my mind. Here it it is:

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.


The uncertainty in this poem is what's set into me, like a barb on some wild plant. "Whose woods these are I think I know," says the speaker, not asserting "I know the owner of these woods," but rather, opening with questioning, sleepy syntax, he says, "I think I know." And after the thinking, the deeper falling into assumption & observation. But even the observation comes with a kind of veil, no specific tree or pattern of snow or path is named. Only sound is truly specific - "the sweep / Of easy wind and downy flake." Sound here is what seduces (and, arguably, always seduces in a Frost poem) for the reality is hard - the frozen lake, the vague dark woods, the isolation "without a farmhouse near" - this is no place to rest, and yet the speaker rests. Is it not so with art? With love? How do we (and why do we want to) understand such an impulse - to stop in an isolated place, to attempt actions we know are dangerous, to gaze at a car crash, to express love over and over to those that have already or could hurt us, to pour ourselves over a piece of art that is inexplicable, that offers no answers or trap doors to the inside?

What is it, in some of us, that desires risk?

the city is on my side

Is mercury in retrograde? In the past two weeks, both the coffeemaker and the car have died, smacking me with the realization of exactly how dependent I've been upon Things. As a result, each morning I have been walking down Edgewood Avenue to a tiny store, buying a cup of coffee and two plums for seventy-five cents, enjoying how bright the leaves become as they die. I'm also becoming re-acquainted with the public bus, my high school sweetheart. Yesterday I had a forty-five minute bus ride misadventure that took me into parts of Pittsburgh I've never seen. I read Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons & noticed that no one else on the bus was reading, although one lost kindred spirit was drinking from a paper bag bottle. He was lost in a different way than I; he didn't know where he was coming from.

A week on varying doses of new medication has me watching time move in a different way, anticipating, thinking back, sitting still. I have been staying up until 4 a.m.,reading Felisberto Hernandez, talking to friends in California, thinking how incredible it is that six people I deeply love were born in the same month, some on the same day.

I'm coming to enjoy living in Wilkinsburg in a different way - next month it will be a year since I've moved here. I love the urban farm a few blocks up, the curving abandoned apartment building where I can't help but envision a production of Kurt Weil's Street Scene. I love this room, its clutter, the books, the monsters, the cat, the dust, the ink, the plants, the revisions floating around as if they moved of their own accord...

RIP Jim Carroll 1950 - 2009

My first time alone in New York City, I was 17 & had just graduated from a high school. The last year had proved to be traumatic & I'd spent much of the spring skipping school, wandering around Pittsburgh & writing poems. My parents thought I was staying with friend on Long Island, but I'd made other arrangements to suit the wildfire in my head. One afternoon I wandered into a bookstore on St. Marks & picked up "Living at the Movies," by Jim Carroll. I'd never heard of Carroll before, but the title "Living at the Movies" had a similar tone to my mentor Jim Daniels' book "Places/Everyone." Then of course, on the cover of the book, this striking black & white portrait of a man whose eyes seemed to have the wildfire I kept in my head. I took the book to a park, where a love affair lasted all afternoon, and bloomed in my heart at the oddest moments, for years to come.


Fragment: Little N.Y. Ode

I sleep on a tar roof

scream into my songs,
into lazy floods of stars...

a white powder paddles through blood and heart

and

the sounds return

pure and easy...

the city is on my side.

the moon's teethmarks are on the sky