Sean Mclain Brown - InnerSpace

InnerSpace

"Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia."
- E.L. Doctorow

I enlisted in the Marine Corps and served in Desert Shield and Desert Storm as a jet engine mechanic on AV8B Harriers. I helped our jets successfully drop more than 2 million pounds of ordinance which killed thousands of people. I have to live with that all the days of my life.

I don't need an alibi. I'm here to confess. I did it. I'm on the run from my own life. I ride on caffeine and fumes. I'm on the run from the Marines, from nightmares, and from the charred bodies of young men, children and women...more

PROJECT: DAILYNESS

Tuesday, August 23rd, 2006

Time (Discontent)

Every day opposed us in old age, when we went shouting, floods and earthquakes poured out of our mouths—it was biblical. In the mornings, we flogged each other with sentiment and by afternoon—in the office or teaching—our wounds festered beautiful red roses. In the evening, our bodies blue with bruises, we lost each other in the blued-out gun-metal air full of our tears falling, so we sat there—too sated to speak—and listened to the spaces where the wind whorls one fear inside us, as a circle eats its own tail, over and over, and in the center, we pictured a boy and girl, their backs toward us—a beautiful boy and girl with slender bodies—dangle their legs in the water at the end of a pier, waiting for summer to end.

What We Own at the End of the Day

At Gun Lake, all that remains are the vast and hollow skeletons of Chevys and Fords, tires and the bottles left behind by teenagers. I am out of time or frozen in it, as ritual as coffee in the morning, memory is a secular shrine, it is the most pedestrian and transient of all places, as with upcountry lakes when dragging the bottom for whatever has fallen out of reach in the junked depth, this gold in the sky, this boat on the water, a few fish rising to call of my lure.

Twelve for New York School

1. I stole this story from a dead man’s mouth, one morning that arrived in time like a shovel not a sword, to function as good fortune, or to wit, for purposes of outsiders trying to dig through.

2. Once the lexicon broke, a great dance ensued after which everyone considered every term to be a double joke. Living at the end of a state of mind, a daydream about escaping from a boring office in New York City where The Dreamer beholds a painting with its houses of pink and white, where men are selling hats on the street and swatting flies, with the promenaders sashaying now that the heat of the day has left its shadow behind. The divine ones drag up shadows in the dust to confuse the brave critics more than anyone else in the world. It is in the mouth opening, the unmasking discontent.

3. Tough and quick and the world in a minute, a crew of friends knocked down walls into a heap of rubbish. They ran with their hearts in their mouths, leaving a bloody trail of letters and paint wherever they went, which frankly, seems as flowers in the wind during springtime.

4. It is a still life in jars of words, conflicting, a little anthology for a polyphony of heroic accents without a war as if life were merely a habit or a loophole for the noble idea of possibility, where the sad music of silence contemplated itself like a child alone in a corner of a schoolyard, or an orphan poem in a three-story building on Third Avenue at Sixteenth Street.

5. It was believed names would make good verbs until a champagne glass shattered at the stem and conversational spit drops refused to make waves.

6. The exacting requirements of form: a flower, a tree, a fruit, and a famous old lady, the word bathtub, or forget-me-not, writing all of this from the bathtub and a willow chair after playing pinball in a café, the words bonus and bumper, a color, a season, the name of a philosopher and so on. In the end, the pinball machine couldn’t take it, and spelled out the word TILT.

7. Think of a first line. Make it a good place for characters to live, as if you could see the sentence through the window of a passing car. Isn’t it worth pausing over? Nothing much happens and the weather is usually terrible, it’s not really so much about New York, but then there is nothing extraordinary about that. It’s a subordinate function of dialogue mimed in the spirit of ridicule and its tone, a strange despair fused with the arch spirit of non-sequitur as what happens with sticks. By boys. Though the others waited. To escape from emotion. And their doctors would agree with their agents, if they had any, that after looking at x-rays of their stomachs full of words, that they did have one more poem inside them.

8. They did it for fun. It dissolved and merged into a handwoven third entity. A road, a friendship of literary lovemaking as the image of two typewriters with their backs to each other, shapeless as an ameba or an emergency on several occasions that yielded farmers a fair shake: not pollen, not birthmark or a bruise, but compatriots together in sestinas, if only to amuse each other with lines like, “…and priests with lips like mutton.” They wrote long poems and posted the days results like ticker tape from Wall Street.

9. They might be regarded as a field resembling an abstract canvas, or people strolling down Main Street, the magnificent porch of pleasure deconstructed plank by plank, what Apollinaire said, so it can be put back together again.

10. A circle of friends pressed in a small room full of furniture made of poetry, dripping wet with fresh paint and music forcing its way out of everyone’s eyes and ears, this of course, was all observed carefully in a letter, where it was obvious that all the friends were simply trying to tell everyone how to act, but that’s another story.

11. Determined to mount an assault on foreign climes, or the trick test questions full of knitted ribbon dresses in a Prospect of Flowers is an accident where no one escapes, that the accident may have a place, the collisions of a game where the elements of chance and play serve as clues of something deeper, a double paradox of enchantment; a frog, warts and all, without apology or attack.

12. This is a dream narrative and the narrator is anyone, and we wake up under the table of a dream. You haven’t moved an inch and everything has changed. What can one say when asked about anything, please don’t ask about the name—New York School— not how it feels, or what it means, think of it this way, a group of geniuses sitting at a table playing poker with faces so stone, you’d think twice before joining their telepathic game, for of course, you are not telepathic and cannot hear their mental choir empty song through streaming windowpanes of color. It’s simply a departure. This is the way the poem ends.

Vignettes

She has memories of an old stone bridge where the moon is tangled in treetops. She paints for days inside a locked room, says the night is surreal and claims this is a dream from which she cannot wake.

Accuse the world for all its madness. Outside the rain has stopped. Later that night her skin glows under pale fluorescent light.

At sunrise she believes nothing has changed. She dances when she’s alone and lies to her husband. She imagined that he could hold her and he almost believed he could.

Count the seconds between lightning and thunder. She says to think it over. Angels of superstition appear around every corner and the moon never moves.

When she was five, she burned her parent’s house down because she was angry with them. She has no memory of it happening.

She’d like to trust criminals and believes in omens. A rooster crows in the distance and she thinks of Christ.

The apostles chase her in dreams. They steal her soul but she knows they don't give a damn. In her paintings, people are shadows, even the trees seem sinister.

She speaks in tongues, as if it would pay her rent in the city they built together. Understanding is not enough.

She consults the tarot and the stars. The characters in her paintings begin to appear real. She paints them in winter and in the sky, despite the sun, the moon slips behind a cloud.

A Place to Call Home

Under the wreckage of the moon in a boxcar smelling of pine tar and creosote, I drink white lightening from a fruit jar. Shunted by trestle crossings, I jump off at switch yards no one heard of and search for my name among gravestones in the family of strangers. I see red and green lights of signal lanterns, but not the men who wield them. I go on living, through the freight yards of cities and the sweeping plains of dark grass whipping wildly in the train’s wake, I go on living, I go on living.

Among the Hidden

She
sleeps
in a white
pool of light

Pink
silk ribbons
around her torso
like a slow flame in fallen snow

White
folds over itself
nothing but a rose blooming
on her shoulder and the

Quick
blush of tulips
crowding her suspended body
in an egg of muted light

Blue : Chasm : Void

We dived into the blue bell of the chasm. Along one wall, a guideline had been rigged. The kelp rose and fell as we descended. I equalized against the pressure as the ecstasy of nitrogen narcosis lined my veins.

One young man told me that mermaids lived there, but he thought the stories might be old wives’ tales told to keep kids away from the sheer-walled holes. Still, for reasons he wouldn’t explain, he never went near them. A young girl was pulled into one of those Blue Holes, but no one talks about her.

Chasms bounced the light where the dead set adrift and were lost, where the pale, slow-motion flurries of green lace scattered against the brightness of our headlamps. Inland holes, too, can be dangerous. Explorers lose their way, turning to exit and finding a blizzard of detritus that their passage has dislodged.

Many had lost their way along a wall of green light close to bottom. We held fast to our guidelines. I floated in a blue eye. Ascending, with no silhouettes. Sunbeams, twisted and lost, reached for us into the void.

(What follows is my draft of a response to Maxine Hong Kingston's excerpt from Woman Warrior)

From Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston

I was born in the middle of World War II. From earliest awareness, my
mother's stories always timely, I watched for three airplanes parting.
Much as I dream recurringly about shrinking babies, I dream that the
sky is covered from horizon to horizon with rows of airplanes,
dirigibles, rocket ships, flying bombs, their formations as even as
stiches. When the sky seems clear in my dreams and I would fly, if I
look too closely, there so silent, far away, and faint in the daylight
that people who do not know about them do not see them, are shiny
silver machines, some not yet invented, being moved, fleets always
being moved from one continent to another, one planet to another. I
must figure out a way to fly between them.

Blue

I was born in the middle of Vietnam. Nothing special about my birth, just a shadowy notion of slipping through a tunnel; the chute going cold after a long night, morning a rise over dunes, the Atlantic, shipwrecks and fighter jets off to Vietnam. And later, many years of absence, how the filling of womb makes meaning only after when empty, how even the faintest of pulses is enough to make a mother cry. Our family of ghosts; they roam the attic like stereotypes, clanging their heavy chains of failed relationships. Always, I dream of my grandfather as stolid as a monument in a Michigan blizzard with his piercing blue eyes and my father in his dress blues off to war. I call to them with all my voices; no one returns my call. After all this time, as much as love and absence, generations settle in sleep, for all of this, I have no voice, no answer to my many questions. I’ve carried these secrets safely over continents and three decades; now is the time to loose them over the ocean, and see, in the instant my heart stops, a whole galaxy of blue, perfectly flat, not the promise of a gift, but the gift itself.

Still Life of Parrot

Sun sails through the windows, black and white, done in charcoal #14, I could not name the bird preening outside, study the edges depth, perspective blurred, thumb the tip, light bleeds through the window, the bird outside squawks, it’s one of the parrots from Telegraph Hill framed by 1910 lead glass, dripping over time, black, white, ashes and wings.

Eye

and there from the other side of the river, which I carry forever, I saw him waving his arms, and me, ankle deep in mud, what I saw, his waving, as if to say, hey watch me, but he held against the eye of the whirlpool for an instant more, wound of the waters took him under and there was nothing I could do. Winded, nothing left in my lungs, no shout, not even a whimper. But there’s a vanishing point in the distance, a ponderous needle and I must figure a way through it’s eye.

Sangha

As they spoke about the war, the story grew into a circle, the antidote to the heavy cadence of soldiers and all things cold, hard, and dead. Stories flew out the window, above the garden and grove into the morning songs of larks and jasmine. Face-to-face, each story’s end is another’s beginning. Suspicious of institutions, they have no name for group, no name for gathering, no name for draft, Vietnam, Korea, or all the Gulf Wars, instead, they settle in silence, wait for the light to tip through the shades in early evening, full circle, each ear opening to listen.

Hill

On that worn road, rutted with bomb craters, we humped our country on our backs, strange insignias stitched on our sleeves, notches on the stocks of our rifles, as if killing could bring us home quicker, we needed to take that hill, secure the airfield, suppress enemy fire, reduce them to cinders with air strikes. I didn’t die on a particular hill our platoon lost and won for the third time, and if that is true then the flashes from muzzles, the discharge of gas and ejection of brass from rifles, and the bodies that fell, are simply a trick of memory, the way the mind perverts history and events, like witnesses of a singularity who record multiple interpretations, and remembering that day—the precise angle of fire, pacing and measuring, mortar and mine, I beat a path, brown sky mirrored in puddles, cinch my pack higher on my shoulders, my shadow of weary composure mocks me in the bright sun, I continue up the hill.

Ne plus ultra

I was a boy lingering in a borrowed childhood. I was born in a forest, swaddled by the roots of the trees, held fast to the brown and green pulse through the dirt and dry pine needles. I weave clothes from vines and bark, eat rich dark silt from the bed of the river, and sleep in a nest of leaves and golden flowers. I rose from dark humus and glacial moraine. My skin is etched with the secret runes of insects. The sight of one blood red gold orchid opening at mid-summer makes me weep. I was raised by no one, No-one is my name.

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Thursday, August 10th, 2006

We Remember Moments, Not Days
for Cesare Pavese

Today, this one, not any other, today, no one will raise their hand and wave hello, no one will mention my name, no one will look me in the eye. I will leave no tracks, no evidences of my passing through, not even the slightest ruffle of breeze or brief scent of cedar and cinnamon, only this moment, not the hours and minutes, but the day stretched out as a cat in a hidden spot of sun.

Narrative

In another life, and again in this one, they met. It was that easy. Some evening places are wonderful, when the boy meets the girl and conversation arrives in time like a sword, always on the edge of it, to function as good fortune, or to wit, for purposes of the two who travel apart, and he thinks of the pleasure of meeting her and he sits and writes about her as if life were more than a habit or a loophole for the noble idea of possibility, as if it were a poem, always in motion and counter-motion, so gusty you closed your eyes and felt your hair brushed back by the wind of it, something that happens for the first time, every time.

This is a dream narrative and the narrator is the boy and girl, and they wake up under the table of a dream stealing kisses. They haven’t moved an inch and everything has changed. Another body emerges from two, a kind of Wabi-Sabi, an imperfect art. He says yes to this too, the fear of touching the earth or weightlessness, he feels impinged by some gravity of another, other secrets come easier where after he has left her presence, the after-image of grace, in spite of what they say or fail she and he pause, faint sound rises, flutters, wings struggle for altitude, there is time enough to listen.

The World's More Full of Weeping than You Can Understand

Here is my gift: a word, a key. Take my profane apologies for all the moments you felt betrayed by your father; when you and your father built a garage for your first home, and your father tried to tell you he was sorry, you wouldn’t hear it, you told him to leave. Take my words until I am mute and dumb and unshackle your troubled life, your past, all the secret things laced and bundled, categorized, named and numbered. But I know, even as offerings of food for the dead rot in the sun, you would rather go hungry. The truth is you turned away and decided to go into the dark alone; not like a lamb, more like a fox, fierce to your young and the world, because, after all, the world is a terrible place to live among strangers. Better to live and die alone on a holy mountain than to mingle with sinners.

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Monday, August 7th, 2006

How the West Was Lost

Life was easy then, vicious but green as riverbank moss, two words passed through her mind—river, drowned—and she saw him flail, a bright hope entangled in a whirlpool, the compromise of living so close to water, you had to get wet, you had to fish, string them up and gut them, put them in a pan for a Sunday fry and bury your dead in a pine box—3 foot by four foot.

How the West Was Won

He grew strong and wild. When setting traps in the woods, he said, please see what I’ve killed, feel the soft fur of the rabbit’s thick limp throat. Later, he tended horses, interpreted the sky by shades while miles away his mother read his letters one by one, in her mind, she saw him in the west country, his world, one great pleasure, the cool breeze wicking away sweat from his dimpled face, and in that moment, edged by the offering of heat rising through the green living room curtains, she saw his thick red hair, his cow-lick, the blue of his eyes as he swung himself up on his horse, and began a slow lazy figure around cattle, prodding them along toward an expected pendulous sun, and just like that, he became small in her mind, haloed in orange light, like an ant in dust.

Hedgerow

The very idea of staying level is absurd, I say, as the electric clipper hums along the top of the hedge. Admirers long ago wove fresh clippings into crowns and place them squarely on the heads of the venerated. To hope for such entitlement in old age is moot. From a distance everything looks shimmery and bright, just out of focus. Let me have my moment, which is what I will remember, not the day with its generality, but the collective will of a slide show shown on a wall in your aunt’s basement of people who were once young, full of life and hope. What do I hold at bay? Here is the precise line that I follow, around which the hedge thickens. I lean into the heat, a bright patch of sun, catch whatever sounds slide by, from the valley rises the interstate’s purr, the chirrup of a nearby bird, and I raise the floating light to my lips until the sun goes down.

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Friday, August 4th, 2006

Non Nunquam Fidelis

Through a restless night and into morning and I feel like Empedocles who stuck his head through the sky’s crystal sphere to see the world unfettered—if that is possible—is it?

You said, whatever you do, do better than anyone else, and where are you now? There are no stars to guide you, no path with lanterns to light the way home, no phosphorescent glow of tracer flares to signal help, what will you do when your time comes?

Our Marine’s totem—an eagle, globe and anchor—will not save you, there is no platoon squad establishing a perimeter to search for you, there are no ceremonious masts held in your name, there is only a long white corridor leading to a sterile white room with no windows, and there on the gurney you will lay, and your last words, who will hear them?

Today

The usual things happened today: a series of seasons, the slow unbuttoning of two shirts, intimacy between strangers, two cups of coffee, a grackle alights on my chair, sings to me for a crumb of croissant, a woman died when a concrete wall crushed her car, I lost myself in a ride by the Pacific, crowds of calla lilies on the hillside like white flags in the breeze, and in the paper, all the little wars that never end, only the weather changes with little variety, some fog, a high pressure zone pushes eastward, some sun, a wedge of geese, and all today’s wars, newspapers in the trash can.

Wednesday, August 2nd, 2006

Greasemonkey

Men have been broken by their dreams for as long as the continents have been
drifting, father said, as he scraped grease out from under his nails with a knife.

Always when father and I talked, it was between passing wrenches, hoisting engines
and transmissions, cleaning spare parts, the smell of gasoline fermenting our brains.

This is how I know my father. What I don’t know fills notebooks. He secretly wrote
poems in the middle of the night. he wished he was a famous poet, or at least a farmer
living alone with animals, simplicity enticed him, but always the world held him down,
baptized him in 10W40 motor oil, sanctified to a grease-monkey’s life of repair and replace.

It’s true. Words live in us long after the mouths that spoke them are distant and mute.
Years later, I pass through my childhood town, stop and walk by the banks of the river after
a storm where we fished at midnight, using night-crawlers. And right then, my trajectory alters,
words return, what was lost is found. Everything is changed.

My Longest Day

Clearly a miracle is needed. So I prayed, lassoed the sun with a leash and tethered it to my staff. I held it at High Noon. I wonder what Galileo would think. This really freaked the Amorites, as they worshipped the very sun trailing like a golden bird from my staff. I see nothing but people beset by plagues and disease, years of hard labor crushed my people. Wherever I went, people stopped and starred, asking me about the war in Canaan and of course, the sun tethered to my staff. When they began to gather around me, I worked the crowd, I performed my signature “Walk the Sun” trick where I whistle three times, snap the tether on my staff and the sun’s shadow moves backwards ten steps. They’d ooohh and ahhhh, yes, that’s a real crowd pleaser. Eat your heart out Moses.

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InnerSpace

"Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia." - E.L. Doctorow

Project: Dailyness

"Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia."
- E.L. Doctorow