Pulling Leather

What I’m  trying to say is that if an experience is bent into a sandy beach it might be better presented as a Christmas present than a poem.

Or bicycle.

Me, I like to drink coffee and roll around on the floor until someone scratches my belly.

I ceased worrying about maturity long ago. It didn’t even appear on my radar. I worried about character. Character is a good thing. Character is fundamental. Feeling is paste.

The difference between men and women is milky with ambiguity.

It isn’t always about genitalia. Sometimes it’s a matter of glass slippers and dawdling around a 7-11 at dawn, waiting for Igor and the Count to arrive. There is no behavior that can be described as singularly male or female. What there is, is this: prickly collars, participles, and skin. The push toward absolutes. The anxiety resulting from not finding any absolutes.

Fourteen months after the accident at Fukushima Daiichi, a pool brimming with used fuel rods and filled with vast quantities of radioactive cesium still sits on the top floor of a heavily damaged reactor building, covered only with plastic, says the New York Times.

Fuck me.

We all live under the sword of Damocles. The foot of a chair, the back windows with a view, the edge of a table, corals, water, round glass, fish, these are some of the elements casted in this world of strangers. Welcome to the Aquarium!

Mushrooms flourish in the nimble swell of a lollipop brassiere. Accept it as a symptom, a sign of quivering disembodiment, the kind of disease that begins in the ego and ends in the planetarium, where the universe swirls around your head in the form of a million gazillion stars, and spasms of escape from the thralldom of work assume an astronomical urgency.

Disunion of production and consumption is a common enough occurrence. But how does one remain sane and balanced in the midst of all this hallucination?

The cowboys call it Pulling Leather:  holding onto the saddle horn to keep from getting thrown when a horse is bucking.

Indispensable Sculpture Liberation Cloud

The sentence is a device for indulging the cuticles of the crow. The miniscule, the huge, the ugly, the beautiful, the beautifully ugly, the disgustingly beautiful. It is the gargantuan revelation of an abstract interior clarified in coffeehouse butter. Sensations cemented sympathetically in a Pullman raspberry. Iron succeeds in evocation precisely because of this. The same might be said of the stethoscope. It, too, is a device. It, too, yields the heartbeat of a long lost highway. The geography of nerves surrounding a shaker of salt. The weirdness of pain. The glamour of signs refining the havoc of speech.  

It must be supposed that experience is not merely a passively received phenomenon but a creatively structured aggregate of sensation and string. Plaster and incense and the friendly chiaroscuro of caramel locomotives reposing in a Tuscany barn. 

If the predicate appears to assume mass, you must attach it to a subject before it stiffens into refrain, or gravitates into theory.

If the dime were orthogonal, its surface would be velvet.

Time and distance bind the pages of the universe. Processions of words cohere into shadow and thorn.

Talking Lobster, fifty miles ahead, said the sign.

The lobster turned out to be this real fat guy floating in an inner tube with two huge Styrofoam pincers and a bottle of tequila tucked between his legs. But what’s strange is that the guy really did say some pretty stunning things. He said that eyebrows were profligate allegories visiting the forehead with the express purpose of evacuating blood to the nearest fedora.

If you cannot find a fedora, one will be provided.

Sometimes a sentence will have a fragile translucence, like a glass railroad, and plunge forward in a syntax of sheer momentum, the glitter of a locomotive chandelier swarming with ravenous eyes.

Daub is such a lovely word, I will not use it in a sentence, unless it is a sentence of vertical embroidery, like a breakfast tumbled into a kitchen sink and abandoned until afternoon, when someone finally gets around to doing the dishes. The crab abandons its body and flutters into maturity. The sensations are cemented in sympathy and put into circulation. Abstraction’s palette elevates the scene into a drama of doublets and rapiers. What you would hardly expect, this being Wyoming and all.

Here I am in the doorjamb, leaning into the light, like in a Bob Dylan song, when someone leaves in a fit of pique and sorrow and the atmosphere becomes electrically charged, the elation of muscle twisting the bones of a poetry engine into a simulacrum of grace.  

Or the sentence bursts into asphalt, and succeeds at mindful clean singing, coffee tossed to the back of the throat while the morning is still young and beautiful, and the stethoscope sparkles, hanging from the rearview mirror, while a leviathan sixteen wheel rig approaches from behind.

Many sentences can be explained by the art of persuasion, for that’s what life does when it begins to grip the controversy of diagnosis, and the modification of meaning by way of the goldfish propellers, as clarified by the roles in predication.  Good purposes are often served by not tampering with vagueness. Vagueness is not incompatible with precision. A painter with a limited palette can achieve more precise representation by thinning and combining her colors than a mosaic worker can achieve with a variety of tiles, and the skillful superimposing of vaguenesses can persuade even the most dubious that a dollop of bells decrees the advantage of eggplant over the demands of Goya’s monsters.

We discover that the universe is not static, it is expanding.

For further information, contact Guillaume Apollinaire, at Père-Lachaise Cemetery, 15 Boulevard de Ménilmontant.

The Lobster Trembles On Its Pedestal

Sometimes I look at all the books in our apartment and wonder what the hell, how did this happen? So few people consider books as anything else than curious antiquities from a bygone era. They’ve become the equivalent of Civil War daguerreotypes. Reading is now done rapidly and indifferently on a computer screen. Intellectual curiosity, critical thinking, and aesthetic appreciation for a well-crafted sentence are equally antique. The equivalent of alchemy, falconry, blacksmithing, and the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance. I feel more like a contemporary of Albertus Magnus than Mark Zuckerberg .

But this isn’t about how old and anachronistic I feel. I’m fascinated by value. What people value. What people consider to be important. Will pay big money for. Take care of. Hone. Polish. Discuss. Boast about. Brandish.

Me, it’s still books. The other day at the doctor’s I grabbed my jacket and Francis Ponge’s Pièces fell out. It went thwack on the floor. My doctor looked down. Pièces, he said. I felt good about that. I’m glad it wasn’t a cell phone. I’m glad it was a book. A French book. About objects. Frogs, washing machines, goats. Olives, wine, swallows. There’s even a piece about the telephone, which he compares to a lobster. “… le homard frémit sur son socle.”

I despise cell phones. They’re the death of solitude. The dignity of what passed for privacy within a public space is gone. People blab about the banalities of their existence as if each were specially ordained by God to go about the surface of the planet spreading the word of their status and privilege. A pram and a dog add to the aggrandizement.

There is nothing to know in all there is to say. It is all void when it comes down to it. Whatever it turns out to be. There is no direct equivalent for the pronoun ‘it’ in Japanese. It may turn out to be nothing. So the sentence, “it’s nothing,” is redundant, at least in Japanese.

The primary value of my life has been art. It has been a devotion to making objects, or creating phenomena, with no utility outside of their own reason for being. This is an inherently adversarial position in a society so aggressively driven by predatory capitalism and the Protestant work ethic. Both of which I have despised. They were the enemy. I can’t help but feel now that I’m in my mid-60s, utterly useless. I did not derail the corporate juggernaut. I got hoisted by my own petard. If there is consolation, it is this: even in failure there is sometimes fulfillment.

Fulfillment brims with alibi. It can be all sorts of things. A comfortable bed. Codeine for a cold. Baclava. The quality of the light in Reims Cathedral. The taste of rain. Kitties in dream’s afternoon. And anything that can’t be and can and is and isn’t.

New Book Arrivals

This has been a great week for books, awful week for health. I’ve been down with some form of virus. Literally down. This morning I was on the floor for a half hour because of a nosebleed. Too much antihistamine. My nose had dried out so much it fell off. I had to glue it back on. I listened to Patrick Simonin interview Ed Norton at the Cannes film festival while I waited for the glue to dry.

Four books arrived during the week. Rather than wait to review them individually, which would take some months, I thought I’d go ahead and discuss them as a group. That takes a lot of weight off. It doesn’t feel so much like a huge homework assignment. And I can get word out much quicker.

The first to arrive was Brian Lucas’s Circles Matter published by BlazeVOX [books]. This is a relatively slim volume of 94 pages. The poetry is rich in phantasmagoria. Lucas is a neo-surrealist in the manner of Will Alexander and Andrew Joron. His language differs from Alexander’s lexical richness and trance-like splendor. It feels more deliberate, more precise, a little closer to Joron’s highly concentrated word play. Like Joron, Lucas’s poesis seems to have some of its roots in science fiction, two-headed machinic assemblages rotating in all directions.

Lucas constructs worlds “imbued with meaning, and physical dimension,” but with the flavor of phantasm , “images of cities and ghosts,” places outside time, places that aren’t geographic at all but seem “startled out of ordinary mind.”  The Coleridge of “Kubla Kahn” comes to mind, and Tarkovsky’s Stalker, in which Stalker brings two clients to a site known as the Zone, a place that doesn’t appear to be different from the rest of the industrial area in which it’s filmed but seems, nevertheless, imbued with magic, with some ineffable quality of strangeness. It is promised that one’s desires can be fulfilled in the Zone. The Zone, then, serves as a metaphor for the movie itself, or for the circularity of Lucas’s communicating vessels, in which redemption from the despair of the banal and vapid is to be found in the wells of the marvelous.

There is a vigorous eclecticism of form in Circles Matter. It seems ironic that the title has a geometric reference, though it is evident that Lucas is mindful of the circularity of time and space and infinite correlations among things. There are a few prose poems in the collection, but most of the work is presented in short paragraphs à la René Char, or short stanzas with indented margins. Lines are often generously spaced, which promotes a feeling of weightless anticipation. Linearity is ruptured. Lucas doesn’t describe, he manifests. He presents the reader with a world of fantastic scope and color and he does so with conviction. His words have the feel of something real, minerals gathered from the surface of another planet.

I was especially taken with two sentences on page 22: “There are few things more spectacular than a flame. One of them is the impulse to make that flame.” If flame is to be taken as a metaphor for poetry, or for the creative act in general, that impulse is truly mysterious. What, for instance, led the first Cro Magnon artist to bring a flame into a cave to paint bison and horses on its walls?

Dire Straits, poetry by Ed Foster, published by Marsh Hawk Press, arrived in the mail that same day. This is, I believe, Foster’s fifteenth book of poetry.

Foster writes with great economy. His words feel chiseled and dovetailed into place. Like Zukofsky, Foster evinces the meticulous care of a seasoned cabinet maker. But it is out of this economy that he finds the richness that he is looking for. He has been strongly influenced by the poet William Bronk, a fellow New Englander, whose stark, gnomic lines of lucid abstraction play on the dynamic of inner and outer penetrating one another. Foster, who likes the muted registers and stunning clarity of the black and white photography he often includes in his books, is engrossed by the dialectic between art and life and the complexities and ambiguities of human emotion.  This is his strait. His narrows. He doesn’t just articulate ideas, he struggles against them. His poetry has an edgy undercurrent. It doesn’t settle. It searches for where the words begin.

And wouldn’t you know it, who arrives in the mail the next day but William Bronk. Bursts of Light: the collected later poems, edited by David Clippinger, published by Talisman House. Bronk seems to have grown in popularity of late. I see more and more references to him. To me, he is a fascinating mystery. His poetry has the directness of approach I find among the objectivists, and Bronk’s poetry has been compared to Oppen’s in a cogent essay by Henry Weinfield (“The Music of Thought in the Poetry of  George Oppen and William Bronk"), but it is even more stark, the poems don’t hesitate to get right to the point. Nor does Bronk seem at all interested in lyrical affect. I could be totally wrong about this. There is most definitely a prosody according to other sensibilities, and I have seen essays discuss his lyricism online, such as Thomas Lisk’s “William Bronk’s Path Among The Forms," but to my sense the lines are exhilarating precisely because they’re so blithely disencumbered of lyrical apparatus. His poems are bald. So wonderfully bald it’s invigorating. He says everything with such confidence. Maybe that’s because Bronk is one of those old WWII guys. One of those let’s get down to business guys. I think I’m going to really love reading this book. Because I’m  old and I’m tired of obfuscation. I’m tired of affect. Bronk is a welcome tonic.

New Poetry From Spain, edited and translated by Marta Lopez-Luaces, Johnny Lorenz, and Edwin M. Lamboy, also from Talisman House, arrived in the same package with Bronk. I look forward to this because it’s an area I’ve neglected over the years. According to the introduction, by Marta Lopez-Luaces, “This anthology focuses on the poetry written in Spain after 1975. All the poets included were raised under Franco’s dictatorship, which lasted forty years…. the social reality after Franco’s death in 1975 was very different from that in which all of these poets had been raised. A new conception of the self had to emerge after the transition to democracy, and this was expressed in the word of many poets as a liberating, though painful, transformation, a transformation that affected the very concept of language. Naturally, the radical reinvention of language produced a reinvention of self.”

Cupcake Royale, a chapbook of poetry by Sarah Mangold, arrived a few weeks ago. I thought I’d add mention of it at the end as a nice desert. The poems in this collection are modest as cat whiskers, droll as a giant Norwegian rabbit. Mangold does not like to pontificate. Never has. She favors the highly disjunctive, fragmentary lines found among poets such as Ted Berrigan and Tom Raworth. The world is presented as a simultaneity of sensation, a collage of wildly dissociative phenomena. Subjectivity is decentered beyond the margin. Mangold does not seem present. The poetry is not about her. The poetry is available to the eyes in whatever sense you want to take it. I feel nudged, a little, by the choices she has made. She likes the odd and quirky, the neglected and marginal. A cupcake, not a multi-tiered wedding cake.

Cupcake Royale was published by above / ground press in Ontario, Canada and can be purchased  via Rob Mclennan, rr #1, Maxville, Ontario, koc 1to. It is $4.00. Which is probably less than a cupcake.

The Ears Of The Cricket

The ears of the cricket are on its legs, and a voice like opera

Comes out of the fish to resume reconciliation. Pack

The ooze of emotion in a suitcase of poetry

Boxed in dirt, where the yearning is soft

And harsh necessity is willing to abdicate

To a hot delirium if the melody is wearing feathers

Try to think of this as a poem evident in the cloth

Of the moment. This moment, which is perfect

To tell you about bugs. What can we do about bugs?

I find most bugs to be charming, honest, and baritone

I just don’t want to play around with them anymore

My favorite animal is faith itself

And all the questions I have regarding life and death

I believe olives are eyeballs that grow on the limbs

Of martini trees. And then once in a while it rains

Watercolor antlers nudge life into a new idiom

In which the pasta has been chained to a passport

Glistening with environmental sorrow

A dent in the syntax will obliterate the clock

And if you look closely into the heart of the universe

You will see a forest of Peruvian X-rays

Humming in the heat of the jungle

Never scorn a handstand appareled in watermelon

Only yesterday I saw an octopus

Demonstrate vegetable cutters on the waterfront

Which led me to a deeper understanding of tassels

Have you ever photographed a barracuda

With your head? There is a camera of the mind

Where the film is developed by hunger

But you can choose your own chemicals

And step into the experience of yourself

Dawdling in secrets and argyle. The opus grows

Into a cake. The dirt has its own stomach. Toothpicks

Return us to crickets. Where our ears mirror

The appearance of sound in a dead man’s name

Language With A Glaze

Alpha Donut: the Selected Shorter Works by Matvei Yankelevich

United Artists Books, 2012

“In total amusement of what we call / a poem,” writes Matvei Yankelevich, “… the real thing is not visible, just the controlling apparatus.”

So what is the “real thing?” I cannot get the image of a doughnut hole out of my head. Is it the hole of the doughnut that is real? Is Nothingness the basis of all reality?

It is safe to assume the controlling apparatus is language. It is probably not a lawn mower.

But you never know.

Alpha Donut is a pleasurable read. Yankelevich excels at the deceptively simple, the casual, off-hand sentence that carries a potent charge. The writing is, in fact, quite precise. Its strict attention to economy of statement is masked by a congenial sense of the comic. There is much of the same drollery I find in Ron Padgett, such as the line “Hop hop hop / goes the busy noun / following its chosen subject / around like an angry bee, but more /  like a frightened rabbit.”

Yankelevich writes, also, with the same unconstrained candor as Joe Brainard, and it is evident he has been strongly influenced by the New York School of Poets. His poetry is observational, detailing the everyday, and rampant and all-inclusive, taking in experience and walking it around like a Lippizanner stallion at Madison Square Garden. He enjoys constructing sentences. He enjoys assembling words and making them do odd tricks. “You can go backwards and forwards / with wheels made of water.” “Buster Keaton puts on a poker face and leaps / into oncoming traffic.” “I’m amusing myself with / things like paper, and how it can be / used for this or that.”

It is evident that one of Yankelevich’s chief fascinations is writing itself. Writing as process, writing as representation, writing as dull pain and lofty ideas and signage and frozen conversation. Writing as a theater of the absurd. Writing as a monument in the desert, surrounded by silence. Writing as a vibration between presence and absence. A presence which conceals an absence and an absence which is never quite fully present, chiseled out of air via tongue and ink.

This is a theme he shares with Mallarmé, who evinced a crisis at the core of his work having to do with nothingness, a view of reality as a perpetually unstable, constantly changing continuum hovering between being and non-being. “The more [Mallarmé] had studied individual words,” writes Gordan Millan in his biography of Mallarmé, “repeating them out loud again and again to himself, the more they had gradually seemed to lose their form and meaning, until through the very act of endless repetition he had come to see then for what they essentially were, namely rhythmic vibrations in the air totally devoid of any intrinsic meaning.”

“My work is simply the writing on the page,” Yankelevich confesses. “There is no more depth. Where there is depth it gets too dark to see. Some days I feel like seeing no one. My house is empty; before it could ever be filled with happiness, it accrued emptiness. Cavernous desertion. Desert sorrow. Who even cares what the date happens to be.”

The page is the night sky in reverse: instead of brilliant white stars against a cold black void, we have black words radiating meaning and image against the white of the page.

Which brings me back to the donut. The donut is the perfect image of this. Round, with a hole at the center, full of sugar and insinuation.

The donut is a central resonator which is willed into existence to mark the equivalence of things. The fictive role of language is made obvious by the fragility or arbitrariness of the subject. When the mind is disburdened of calculation, its voyage becomes all that much wider. It is little wonder that the seductions of the unknown are greater than those of the known.

“The wilderness is just another world,” reads the first line of the last stanza of “Twilight Series.”

Forests march through my hair at night.

I wake up with pine needles in my teeth.

I’m a nightwatchman, I was hired by the house.

I am going to shoot those squirrels

the ones that ate my rosebuds

before they got a chance.

Take care,

Take care,

It’s on automatic!

Loss of control is one of the charms of entering into language, even if only in conversation, much less the creation of a literary broadloom. It is, indeed, on automatic. But it still requires tinkering and fuel. The fusion between will and destiny, assembly and experience, is inherently embryonic. The musician can’t make music without sound or instrument. The poet can’t make donuts or blowholes without nouns and diffraction. The bending of waves. The construction of space.

“A little turn of a mysterious screw modifies the microscope of consciousness,” wrote Paul Valéry, “increases the magnification of our attention by its duration, suffices to show us our inner perplexity.”

My Life As A Series Of Houses (1968-2012)

In 1968 I moved to Arcata, California, and stayed with a friend until I found a trailer for rent in back of a Mexican restaurant. An old Italian man named Rocco was renting it. He was a tiny fellow with a welder’s cap and a drop of snot on the end of his nose that never seemed to fully drop but hang there in mucilaginous defiance. I liked the trailer. It was tiny but quiet. My only neighbors, except for the restaurant, were a herd of cows. I lived there happily for two weeks feasting on William Butler Yeats and George Bernard Shaw until one day the water disappeared. I walked to the water department to see what the deal was and they told me the old man had tapped illegally into the restaurant. I told them I was living there. They shrugged their shoulders. They didn’t give a shit. Rocco broke the law. You’re out of luck kid. Plain and simple.

I found a room at the Arcata Hotel. It had a tiny sink and a comfortable bed and a desk. I had to share the bathroom, which was down the hall, but I didn’t mind that. I kind of liked walking through the hall wrapped in a towel. The manager was kind and his nine year old son lent me his comic book collection when I came down with the flu.

While visiting friends in San José in the summer of ‘69 I got romantically involved with a young woman named Jacqueline. My old friend David introduced us. The romance brought me back to San José on a permanent basis. We got married  at Jacqueline’s parent’s house in Saratoga. I took time off from school and got a job as a janitor in a tall black building at the Pruneyard Shopping Center.  We rented in a one-bedroom apartment in Los Gatos, which I loved. Los Gatos is a great little town in the foothills of the Santa Cruz  mountains. David, my old roommate, lived in the complex next door. He was within shouting distance. We also worked together, which saved on transportation. It felt like the Honeymooners. I could hear him arguing with his wife, and he could hear me arguing with my wife. One night when David and I went out looking to snag one of those giant wooden spools the telephone company used which made terrific albeit somewhat wobbly coffee tables we encountered a young man with long wavy hair and a waist-length beard who appeared to be higher than a kite and totally lost. We tried to help him, but he never said a word. We gave up and left him to his hallucinations.

In 1971 I went back to school at San  José State. The commute grew tedious, and expensive. We decided to move back down to the city. I hated leaving pretty Los Gatos, but we found a studio apartment in a quiet neighborhood overlooking the thickly wooded ravine that was Guadalupe Creek. This was a cool place, very cozy and green. One entire wall was glass. A group of raccoons came up every night to eat the dog food  we put out for them in large tin bowls. Sometimes I’d be sitting at my desk and feel something watching me. I’d look down and see a raccoon, his hands against the glass, his eyes riveted on me. They seemed pretty friendly, but once, when I moved to pet a raccoon on the head, the animal snarled and bared his teeth. I remember how much that surprised me. Naïve, I know, I know.

In May, 1972, Jackie and I went to Europe and when we returned David’s arm was in a cast. He’d hit the wall in an argument with his wife. He was now on his own. I found myself divorced a few months later. I found a small yellow house on Balbach Street within walking distance of San José State. There was a paint and body shop on the street and a porn theater where Deep Throat played for three consecutive months. Yet, what I remember most about that place, is the Middle Ages. I was taking a class in Middle English. I loved Middle English. I loved Chaucer and the Pearl Poet and Sir Thomas Malory. I hung Breughel prints on the walls of peasants skating and sleeping and making merry in the village square and burned candles and listened a lot to the Pentangles and Fairport Convention. I can’t remember what made me decide to move from that place. That whole part of my life is very hazy. I just remember the soft golden glow of the candle and peasants sitting at big long tables eating and playing music.

In 1973 I lived in a studio apartment for a short while just before I graduated. I dated a woman who pierced my ear and another woman I met in a James Joyce class who dumped me because I had no future. I moved in with a coke dealer in the Santa Cruz mountains. His house was enormous and very modern and beautiful. I took a liking to him. He was scary smart and self-determining and affable. He lived across the street from a very close friend where I’d been spending a lot of time hanging out, talking poetry, drinking wine, and carving wood. The dealer, a former electrical engineer, rented a room to me because he’d been busted and needed the money for his legal expenses. The surroundings were gorgeous, a thick forest of redwood and oak and Pacific madrone, but the dealer liked to stay up late night remodeling, running power tools and arguing with attorneys while his girlfriend clocked endless hours at playing pool. The pool table was right below my room. Click. Click click. Click click click. Click click click clickety click. One night just as I dozed off I was awakened by a circular saw going right next to my head. The coke dealer was working on his deck. His hair was biblically long and he wore a pair of goggles as he worked on his patio utterly oblivious to my presence just a few feet away. It wasn’t long after that that I moved. He was a little suspicious of me since I always turned him down when he offered me a line of coke. I was still a little skittish after my catastrophe on acid. I just drank a lot. He was not terribly sorry to see me go.

In 1975 I moved back to Seattle. I found a spacious studio apartment on 15^th Street on Capitol Hill with a huge kitchen and a fireplace. I got a job folding and dispensing towels at University Hospital. I only worked sixteen hours a week. And yet I could afford the studio and have enough left over after groceries and bills for a Guinness at the local watering hole which was called The Canterbury. The studio, which I rented from an Austrian chef, was $125 a month. There was a used bookstore a couple of blocks down the street where I discovered Ron Padgett and Ted Berrigan. I stopped writing ballads and began writing poetry à la Ron Padgett and Ted Berrigan. I lived inSeattle but imagined myself living in Manhattan on the lower east side.

In 1977 I got a job in the mailroom for the University of Washington which lasted nineteen years. I also got married again.That lasted about nine years. We lived in two apartments, one on Capitol Hill where we had a peeping tom problem with a local sixteen year old boy, another in Wallingford where I almost got arrested while checking the door as I was leaving for work and did not have the correct address on my driver’s license, and rented a small white house in Lake City (where Gary Snyder grew up when Lake City was mostly pig farms), before we bought a house for $69.000 dollars on a nearby street. This was a great little house. It had three bedrooms, one of which I used as a study, but the marriage was tenuous. When it ended, in 1986, I found  myself back on Capitol Hill living in a studio apartment, somewhat dazed and suffering heavily from depression. In 1988 I began to feel better and met a piano tuner. We moved into a one-bedroom apartment  on Roy Street which had a spectacular view of Lake Union. But then that relationship ended and I moved to a one-bedroom on Belmont where I once again assumed a hermetic life style. I quit drinking and began attending AA meetings. 

I really began to enjoy the single life. There was a brief fling with The Girlfriend From Hell in 1990, but apart from that, I looked forward to a life of hermetic tranquility. I was totally fine living alone. I liked living alone. The meetings were going well. I quit smoking. I began running long distances. I had several years of sobriety. I completed my first half-marathon in 1993. Things were stabilizing. A way of life was developing. And then it all changed again.

A young poet named Tom Hunley nominated me for a poetry competition where I met a pretty young poet named Roberta. I was instantly smitten. We both won the poetry competition and began to date. Our first date was a ferry trip to Bremerton and back. We got married on a warm sunny February afternoon in 1993 in the penthouse suite of the Sorrento Hotel. Nineteen  years down the proverbial road I am happy to report we are still happily married and living in a one-bedroom apartment on Queen Anne Hill, not far from the apartment where, as a fourteen year old kid in 1961, I listened to Lonnie Donegan and His Skiffle Group sing Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavor On The Bedpost Over Night.