Poems & Prose over Time
Common Place No. 16 | A Special Issue | Winter 2020
Poems & Prose over Time The Writer’s own Choices
Š 2020 by John J. Parman |compiled and edited in Berkeley, California |complace.j2parman.com
Some prose to lead this off.
We’d like to be cured of death—isn’t this really what we want? We’d like to be the gods that we resemble, in our own minds, but are not. Instead, we’ve done a reasonable job of extending life, eliminating the short order deaths like heart attacks and strokes, so that now we can survive to succumb to the slower ones, with their greater agony and expense. It’s enough to make you start smoking cigars and buttering your steaks with lard.
Citizens of the Cosmos At a conference on future metropolitan regions at Berkeley in 2005, the landscape architect Randy Hester said that “government should limit itself to regions and neighborhoods—focus on them, and everything else will take care of itself.” This may be utopian, but I think it’s true. We define regions by their ecosystems and neighborhoods by clusters of people who know each other. A city is more arbitrarily defined and its interests are often at odds with its region and with its neighborhoods. Cities will deliberately harm the ecosystem to achieve short-term interests. Regions, especially if environmental stewardship is among their main responsibilities, have a harder time doing so. Like families, neighborhoods are conservative when it comes to their traditional rights and prerogatives. And yet, like families, they can be remarkably enlightened about change when they see an evolutionary reason to do so. In a marriage that transgresses racial or cultural taboos, the appearance of grandchildren often mends the generational rift. Similarly, regionally-beneficent changes to a neighborhood’s fabric that neighbors themselves see as a favorable evolution at their level will do much more to transform a city in the long run than any intervention that bypasses the steps that make this evolution possible. Such changes attract favor, not so much by fitting in, although that’s part of it, but by opening a door to a future that invites people in. Much that cities present to them as the putative future has an “eat your spinach” quality. Cities nag and scold. They also lie and their hypocrisies and self-dealing are often too much in evidence for them to command much moral authority. In April 2008, I visited my daughter in the Alpujarra region of Andalusia, Spain. Despite its primitive character, the Alpujarra is a product of successive generations of people terracing the land and then building and rebuilding an elaborate system of channels to bring fresh water to every valley from the melting snowpack of the Sierra Nevada Mountains behind Granada. Civilizations come and go, but what is valued regionally is preserved, maintained, and extended locally. Cities once had the knack. The church near where we stayed in Granada, a former mosque adapted to the new order, is an example. When my daughter visited us, we talked about how the relative simplicity of our life in Berkeley reflects how the urban affluent organize their days. In her valley, a great deal of time is spent simply subsisting, but it’s still possible for a naturalist like Julio Donat to pursue the kind of program of local knowledge there that Thoreau pursued in Concord, cataloguing what’s in front of him and understanding and documenting its value. Both found a world in these places that was alive to the world. There was and is nothing provincial about it. Richard Olney, a well=known chef and writer on food and wine, ended up living and dying on a hillside in the French countryside. Planted there, he remained cosmopolitan. This is also true of my daughter’s friend Donat. Born and educated in Madrid, he moves between the valley and the metropolis easily, although he chooses to live and work in the former, not the latter. Being a citizen of the cosmos permits this.
For my mother, being modern meant embracing modern conveniences, like instant foods. In the tropics, canned or frozen foods were a necessity to eat a Western diet, but my mother saw them as a time saver. I don’t begrudge her this, although over time her penchant for prefabricated foods fell out of favor. Pop artists made hay with this aspect of 1950s American modernism. As captured by the deadpan Andy Warhol, it was pretty funny. My mother was modern to the end. I never asked her about Pop Art, but I imagine she thought it was modern, too.
In Hell Work is tantalizingly close to done. You eat your sandwich at your desk, munching. Evenings and weekends always promise fun and your book suggests some weekday lunching, but then those plans fall through. It starts to rain. On the train, one woman bores another. “You’re not looking at me,” she says, her pain unleashed, but then she hurries to smother any trace of it, plugs noise in her ears and stares into the middle distance, dead to the other, like one who disappears. (A still-permitted death let it be said.) Life has an eternity left to run. It’s raining out, but they predicted sun. Prokofiev Prokofiev wasn’t so very nice. (“Like you,” you might have said, eyes turned away.) His wife, devoted, kept the flame. “The spice of cruelty stays with you,” I heard her say, remembering his self-centeredness. “Tough luck if he was cruel; the spice of it rubbed raw the mind that animates the parts that fuck, and of course he was brilliant, as you saw.” (Your eyes turn back, then look away again— at least they do so in my thoughts. Days pass between us, even weeks. Like a surgeon, time cuts things up: big, silent gaps, alas.) “I light a cigarette,” she said, “and touch the parts that ache, though by now not as much.”
Over lunch, a friend told me that, despite years of separation and a current relationship of long standing, he and his wife are still married. Formally, there’s marriage and there’s divorce. There are also domestic partnerships, a halfway house toward marriage. Meant to extend some of marriage’s rights to those excluded from it, the category may disappear as marriage grows more inclusive. But it’s possible that a married person, living separately with a different partner, might embrace it in order to afford that second relationship more rights and standing. I mention this because marriage and divorce are usually seen as a binary pairing, a black-and-white rendition of a landscape that we know full well is resplendently colorful, textured, messy, and in flux. When you look back in history, especially across cultures, you see a lot of variation. Looking across a table sometimes, you see former partners breaking bread. Time is a factor here, but when you consider both the tumult and the reconciliation, life can prove bigger than these partners imagined. Certain ties still bind them. Often there is good will toward each other, even if the situation once seemed impossible. This is not an argument for any particular outcome, but for modus vivendi—the ability to take a larger view of things and use one's imagination. Empathy, if one has it, makes a mockery of any insistence that there's only one course to follow. This is the basic fallacy of a black-and-white view of life. Most of us are boiling pots of desires, fears, limitations, and smarts. We slowly acquire wisdom, but slowly is the operative word and though hard-won, it can be gone in a flash. Subject to our volatile natures, we make our way, and marriage and friendship alike have to deal with the carnage. There are times when we’ve had enough, but then we remember that we can be just as impossible ourselves.
Oceania Memory, the title read. Noticed a cleft almost hidden amid the tropical points of reference. Nominally he was in his dotage, yet the flame still lingered: the oceanic concubine fingered in moonlight, her moaning against the buzz of whatever the lizards failed to cull. Wet the way women get, his fingers deft with practice, the one means he still had left. Thinking back, it seemed almost comical to be reduced to this trick, how it was in youth when some pliant schoolgirl lingered long enough to be felt up, her head cocked, feet apart—no lizards, but the memory. Neck Long legged with dark slippers, tatami cushioning the blow, hair clipped, wedding ring a bronze band, and a boy's face. Can’t you see? Her neck is how her lovers view it. Sing, oh muse, of how her back would arch, taken dog-wise, wet from earlobes caressed, parting lips somewhere along the way. Mistaken as we sometimes are, drifting, departing all too soon, those cries still echoing, walls marked, sheets torn by hands grasping. Holding still until taken, taken until spent, balls aching as they sometimes do, no ill will, mistaken as we sometimes are, depart too soon, drifting, humming, playing one's part.
Poppies The paper flowers, the father, granddad, the graves like Chinese cities, all the dead arrayed. What a war they had! Not so bad until it plowed them under. What was said went mostly unspoken. Silence, a sound often written, slices through time and space. The dead either hear us or not. Goes around, the silence between us; face to face it would be different or else diffident, depending on your mood. How are you, then? I ask each time, less and less confident I know how you are really. Well, amen. Mass is over and we’re both still alive. We could talk. I could see you, raise you five. Here In one sense, visceral, then burned, scattered; in another, each and every, imbued— how quickly memory attaches, grips one's sideways glance of things, raises places from their background status. One picks them up; one picks up on them. Present here, one says, telling a story that overlays death with what lives on. I used to picture it slipping between time's folds, a shimmering into and out of material life. It’s not quite the Noh play I imagined. Despite the flames and ashes, so much persists: not just what we trash or give away, nor what we think we see. Being here, he, too.
Hints Signs abound. We wonder which pertain to us. We know the telltale ones our bodies make, stigmata of desire, clear or hidden. The god Eros is indiscriminate and we have only hints of what we seek. Mars too may be like this, strewing the beach with false hopes, each abandoned with a cry amid rattling of guns, cannon fire. Alone within the crowd, they beg the god to spare them. Thus, the usual process is narrowed to the depth of a beachhead, and when it’s attained, there’s no turning back— those who live press on. Above the beach the luckless dead lie buried in long rows. Curlews Once Karen said, “What the gods give us cannot be rejected, being their gifts.” I believe we have some hand in our fate, choosing its broad outlines. Perhaps karma does this for us, so eventually we are content to be, accepting as given life’s real nature and our place within it. Moving in and out with the tide, curlews haunt the beach, not questioning its bounty. They find sustenance with alacrity and did so even then, despite the dead— the last living things glanced by some of them. We often affirm how lucky we are. That luck begins with being here at all.
Three diary entries from the mid-1990s. In a conversation over coffee, I was told that I was selfish and that my diary was replete with references to money— evidently my central preoccupation. She asked repeatedly if I was offended by these criticisms, and interjected that I was also generous, but that what wrecked things was the need to schedule every encounter. “I could never just see you!” Of course, I could only agree with this. Then I mentioned the text of a postcard I sent her while she was away, in care of her old aunt: “Maybe we would have gotten along better if I’d been a woman.” She half-screamed and said, “You wrote that? I hope no one can read your writing!” I thought last night of a novel, set Woolf style in a single day, called “The Marriage.” It follows the protagonist through his day as lived and through a series of flashbacks that illuminate his current situation and his own part in it—a satirical novel in which I’m the object of satire, in fact. The novel would chronicle my many contributions to my current semi-unhappy state of ambivalence and to some extent of sorrow. Two paintings in Venice: (1) The woman stares at the viewer. She holds her baby to her breast. A piece of cloth lends modesty to her upper torso, but her exposed belly suggests a recent birth. (2) The Virgin sits at her desk and reads. The angel’s red sandals are wrapped around his feet, his robe elaborately folded, almost defying gravity.
Gifts are their own category I caught a glimpse of him in his workman’s apron, the hallway filled with boxes. She’d come back with her children. “Couldn’t you be happier to see me?” —a question I used to ask her, with no answers. The last time he wore it, you handed me Montaigne. I may have said I wanted to be loved. When I heard the word, I wondered. Not so much insular as unhindered, possessing as momentary, a gift, but gifts are their own category, to which I’m partly blind. Each has its correspondence, like the rug brought back from Greece or the mountain poem, written out, descriptive of the room itself, solid and precarious, with its view, the bed where we lay once in plain hearing.
Leave taking Never was the word you used, that chasm drawn with chalk. Small birds sang along the walk, their haven green and dense. Not far away, you struck something like a longer chord, not purely sound. The women two doors down kept talking. Not far away as I measure time, and never, she said that, too. Dharma is like headlights as the cars turn, the chalk faint on the walk, the trees green and kempt, barely shelter. Not far away. Leave taking, melancholia: death alone registers at odd moments. In some seasons I can’t go in. Will death establish that I’m really gone? Chalk X below my skull, Y for where desire lived, circle for my empty head. Not far away as I measure lives.
At MoVida’s bar Women touch their hair as they get ready to be loved. They laugh as the men excite them with their muscular arms. Their mouths open and their eyes widen. Later they will narrow. Here at MoVida’s bar she rehearses love’s sixteen steps, starting with her hair, her hands, mouth open, eyes widened, closer, closer, leaning over, hand in her hair.
My version The deep throb of ships, cats asleep, the easel standing, how I slipped in and out, how it disappeared, how it’s folded now into memory. Descartes was mentioned, the split: I or he, you or she, the ships in their channel, the line we made together visible, arguably a stain, then crossing yet again that momentary bridge. This is my version. The curtains billowed when the wind came up. I’m fairly sure that happened.
When I was younger, the therapists claimed that marriages “took work.” I saw it differently. The household and its responsibilities take work, no doubt, but marriage itself as a close relationship that can be fraught or pleasurable or stagnant in turns isn’t something “to work on.” Anything involving love is a creative act first and foremost. We tend to divide life into the categories handed us as soon as we’re packed off to school. We may question them, even rebel at certain points, but it’s rare that we act effectively on the impulse to transcend them. Those who do—the fashion/street photographer Bill Cunningham and the artist Marc Camille Chaimowicz come to mind— seem as modest as they are passionate about living without the usual divisions. I see them as “working models,” not for how to balance but how simply to refuse to set boundaries on one’s activities or to categorize them. This divvying up reflects the way we allow time to infiltrate our lives for others’ convenience. We live factorylike existences, showing up here and there at appointed times, and being counted present because we literally are. The higher their status, the more people flaunt this convention with impunity, often with breathtaking hypocrisy on full but unconscious display. The frequent lapses into bad behavior in the workplace strike me as an untoward but logical extension of an attitude that assumes bodily possession of employees by those higher up. If we work as serfs for 10 or 12 hours, recovering from it is a tiny bit like it was for the real serfs Alexander Herzen describes in his autobiography: freedom is like staggering into the light. Most of us are proletarians of a sort, alienated in the working world from our birthright as the creators of our own lives. To resist this takes courage, frugality, persistence, and imagination. It benefits from the insight that the working world “as given” is a fragile construct, much more ephemeral than its overlords dare themselves to think. The paranoia the powerful often display reflects their unease about the hierarchy they’ve surmounted. And yet like school the workplace in its different forms involves relationships that, if not close are proximate. We’re among familiars and there’s a kind of camaraderie. In the end, we’re all human, but the imbalances in power—also found in marriages and families—distort this. If there’s a fundamental reason for refusing to divide life up arbitrarily and work according to the dictates of the factory, it’s that it diminishes our humanity—the root of every creative act. We are exhorted to “work on it,” but to do so—to buckle under—is spiritually toxic. When the Zen reformer Dōgen was in China, he encountered an old monk gathering wood for the kitchen. “Aren’t you too old to be doing that?” he asked. “Who else should do it?” the monk replied. The episode relates to Dōgen’s contention that, taken seriously, being the cook in a monastery was the fastest path to enlightenment. I take this to mean not only that gathering wood for the stove is cooking, but that cooking—as life-affirming work—is a spiritual practice. It tempers self-awareness with a devotion to every other sentient being. Buddhism is a philosophy of transcendence. Marx’s “everything solid melts into air” is how it is. Solidity and melting are distinct, yet inextricably paired, the dharma—the reality of life’s transience—our only refuge. If work fails to sustain spiritual as well as material life, then forget about fulfillment. We may choose to live a disciplined life within time. We may even choose a factory-like workplace as an easier way to organize works of interest. But these choices should be conscious, voluntary, and provisional. What we mean by discipline, how we deal with time—these are always in flux. Each of life’s major categories comes with the vast weight of its tradition and the sheer momentum of its unproductive habits. This is why the true artists of life are so rare. Yet they alone accept life as it really is and live creatively within it. As it was when we were young, and as it still often is in dreams, the lives and worlds they inhabit are raw material for their work: its medium and audience. They have life, to use Christopher Alexander’s phrase.
Domesticity The fact of the house, the rooms, curtains gusting out of frames, books, boots, cats, coats, an easel, lives present and lives absent, a tinge never quite dispelled, domesticity bespoke hour by hour: was this a narrative or a list? Recounting (1) Had she been, then nine, sixteen, nineteen, twenty-one, the mother dead. Recounting (2) It must be that we fell (out of love?) (photographs, naked men having sex). It must be that I could (one act is like others: this is a fallacy). It must be that I left (twice, as if in a trance the first time, a reverse). It must be how it ends (again, again, again, but then there is no link). It must be that I fail (again and then again the thread leads back to me). It must be. It must be (out of love, singular amid the talk, laughter).
Two poems derived the Gospels and another from Milton, vaguely.
Gospel (1) Like a breeze? Or nothing, air still, his finger raised, I thought? Silent despite rippled silk, its color hard to place, eyes averted in the moment. After, I was ravenous, and later swollen and sick. He has these dreams, he tells me. In one, travelers gather around us, their words portents; another, a calming hand extends, points west, insistent. He stores things. We leave at night. A moon. The baby’s quiet. She seemed not to notice. Or if noticing, not caring. Enters rustling, glides over tile or dirt, never speaks. Thoughts take root anyway. We must flee, I tell her. He won’t also must be said.
Gospel (2) Jesus appeared, it’s said, spade in hand, to the questioning Magdalene. “Don’t touch me,” He warned her, being halfway there, fresh from harrowing and still toxic or otherworldly. “Just a pinch?” she asked. He held out the spade. “In heaven, a bed, a garden, windows, children.” He looked at her. “A woman will write that man’s desire alone permits his knowing if she knows it to be true.” When they found her, spade in hand, the grave empty, her account omitted the second part. So much else left out. To France, some say, with their son; Daughter of the Church, some claim, a spade mistaken for the true cross. After Milton Minions skating on an icy plane. So many violations, one more fresh gasp at its rasping sting, this thing he grew, falling. Blood to be licked up once they’ve met their match. Tinder’s real, ain’t it? But bon mots mean less and less. I crave the bourgeois life, he thinks: a country house, a wife and kids, a dog perhaps and nothing dead save a grouse in season or a fish.
Walked or tramped Memory is matter and spirit, alive in our heads, Bergson said. Birds mating seasonally, their differences, revived an old narrative: all things unfolding from a source. Finches retold Darwin this story. Surfacing as sensed, nature seemed to be given them and then unfathomably stretched out. Minds took it in, hearts quickened, hands set it down reflexively, hoping for enlightenment. Walked or tramped, then wrote while others sketched or dug to coax it into consciousness. Ikkyü’s coda We went angularly west. The bridge, grey hues, and later into shade, redwoods briefly alight above us. Ascended in low gear, Tomales glanced, narrow where it starts. Descended, more trail than road, found the house, earnest talk: winter’s rain and fall’s smoke, the weight of all that fell on us. Left early, climbed. A bird spoke up. “Smells like Norway.” The scent, damp woods close to the sea. Ikkyü’s coda, another bird. Ours warbled territorially, not so much woken as aware.
For Rob Gayle, 1952–2017.
I stood not far from you. A glance, I think it was a glance, the way particles dissipate when chance spares them collision, a rebirth— the sort that warrants us to pray. Of prayers there was a dearth; just mirth of a funereal sort. A few preened, gossiped, until grief broke in. We can speak of it or something new, the measure of what we’ll miss. Musil pointing the crowd ahead, Berlin ambling toward an abyss, toward a nil, yet cracking jokes in the middle. We edge away from it, often unnerved if life proves too brittle. He had his work, future, promise. Saw him just weeks before, so thin, hopeful. Is it the work we’ll miss? Or is it up to us to write it? In my case, occasional talk, cigarettes and spare words, his wit, his surprising affection, like a dog or guide on a walk that turns and looks for attention.
For Henry Urbach, 1963–2019.
Sometimes invited, endings and caught out every time, drawers spilling contents in loose order. A mind gone to its poles, his family wrote, that was gentle, even feckless when I knew it. Talking once in a car, and then his reply crossed my path last night, one poet quoting another. The sense revolutions make comes at the end, if right. The tiger’s stripes visible and the leopard’s spots magnificent, and my friend cartwheeling through time, landing at my feet, a cat’s smile, not smug but kind.
The warp Your birch trees are not mine. Mine were river aspens. Fishing brought me there, I tell myself. Your wood lapboards are also another kind. Mine were painted, noticed as I walked to the rocks where I once swam. Your small meal isn’t the one I ate alone, an oat scone and dark coffee with steamed milk. It was here we met, the eve of our sabbatical year, tentative and then a dream. I write sometimes about you. The dreams I have are empty, but you figure in poems. These dreams I dream have phantoms, two of them to be precise. Sometimes one takes possession of my wife. I hear a curse of sorts, half of one, a fourth. They also figure in poems. Their small meals aren’t like the ones I had alone. Not that they stand out. Birches and aspens are similar in moonlight I imagine. Night joins us, equally possessed by sleep. Time divides and unites us. Our letters never sync. Space proves random, barely speak unless you’re ready. I wait. Across time I’m immortal, so never rushed. Beds are where the warp is felt, or one place.
This other thing The road south of Olema wound through dense, encroaching woods, straightening as I approached the lagoon. Bolinas forked west and Stinson lay ahead. Heat brings traffic; it was winter. I chose the cot on the landing to sleep alone. Waves all night, the sea down the block. Writing was my nominal purpose; to wait my reality. Coming, going: the way it’s said is this, but I doubt it is. Another time: Hood Canal, mountains across an inlet, a deck, a moment of certainty— brief, eclipsed by time, but there. Where life touches this other thing signs appear that we carry along. Waves all night, the moon rose and fell, their sum infinity or zero, full or empty. No shaman now to give them potency, no way stations, side altars, or relics, just the road, its hubcap shrines obscured, articles of faith scattered behind me.
The question vexes A terrace opera. Love like a Russian gun: act three or five, a shot is heard. Bang! The dog is briefly deafened. He barks. The chorus sings. “Oh!” from one wall, but no answer. Yet the question vexes. Love illusive, its quantum form evades scrutiny. The dog runs in circles, chasing it. But no, the scene has changed: one damn thing after another. Between the sexes, a screen. What you thought you saw, wasn’t. It was some other thing. Wrong is how it boils down; what you felt, love’s facsimile. A scrim, a crime, a good time. There is no truth, only sound mixed with movement, only heat and rivulets, the climax as predicted: “Oh! Oh! Oh!” Again the dog is deafened. He cries, the chorus silent.
Puts it down In the end, a terrace, drink placed on a glass-topped table, the sun at an angle, green close and distant, the ocean intuited, a long walk through a terrain of white deer and their predators—not yet, he thinks, drink in hand, turning his head vaguely north, squinting, puts it down to find his hat. Alone, no one left to love or one to love not likely here, although he thinks of her. She resisted description, he was told over coffee, declined objectivity as pinned down, a specimen. Although he’d foresworn the rites, spring’s fecund buzz caught him out. Possession’s a zero sum, a transient comet. And he doesn’t figure in her thoughts. Benign, a null. But then this was where it always started. Ex nihilo, as they say. He’d made a go with that, long the game, chancing, playing odds, and no one odder than him. Took her measure: a season insufficient proof of love as he conceived it, what we intimate between us, close as one flesh, exchanging genes. All this flashed by, the terrace platform to his reverie.
Joining in At the concert, came to mind that she married her old man. Sun lighting a house, steep hill rising behind it. Birds sang as he played Liszt, his left hand crossing the right one, upper notes plinking, a Yamaha lacking resonance, a prompt for accompaniment, birds and a bobbing dowager joining in, the sun lower, slicing the audience. I put on my dark glasses. I never remarried, the sin Paris fell into, choosing.
Souvenirs derived Falling in with regret or falling out of love, regretting this. (Love fares badly under siege.) Regrets fall silently, reproach for all reproachable things brought from love, carried. Time we swam in once or waded through, soaked in excess then caught out. Regrets aren’t even texts, there being no recipients. Ruled out. Numbers only come to mind, of phone, year of birth, the day, month. Names drift. Somewhere, pianos are untuned or, tuned, evoke the memory of tuning.
Time (1) Walking across the city in the afternoon, there’s no distance suddenly and then there is, time a concertina too when we grab it at both ends. Time (2) Time noticeably slows down. Conversation opens out like a film. An afternoon could pass. It takes that long. “Children are the end result,” I heard the therapist point out. In films, there’s denouement of some sort. We come back to it. “I didn’t catch that part.” “Nowhere to go,” the therapist said. It had no meaning, yet it did. She said it was the thing she liked.
Forms of knowing No longer acting on desire led me to a friendship with a woman in which desire only surfaces in poems. It has to surface somewhere, I imagine. Poems are not to be taken literally, although the poet may mean every word. I can write “her woman’s gait” and recall everything it meant at the time. To act on desire is to want to know, down to the bone, what’s there. Friendship leaves this knowing to others. But this is a dilemma since lovemaking leads to conversations with a transparency that its loosened boundaries make possible. Quantum theory speaks to how something so tangible can be so fleeting. We want gravity to turn off, yet we want solidity, ground beneath our feet. The teleology of desire is family and perpetuation. Anything else strikes us as provisional and unsatisfactory. Where are we when we’re carried away? Still looking for a mooring. When we follow our hearts in life, we’re driven not only by desire but also by hope and imagination. In a lecture I heard, Peter Pragnell showed Le Corbusier’s sketch of a worker reading his newspaper at a kitchen table in the Radiant City. “He saw us as gods,” Pragnell said, and I think that Corb was right: we are as gods. Love carries us to their world, and its moments of eternity—slices of it, in reality, each lived as a slow-moving eddy within life’s normal rush, are what we experience. Briefly, we have all the time in the world, but we’re like two musicians— composers, players, and instruments all at once—caught up in the sheer pleasure of improvising. Caught up and caught out, when gravity reasserts itself, and yet our human métier, perhaps, and one main reason for being.
Four digressions from De Minimis
Driving east Sometime in March, driving east, we stopped at Little America, four a.m., heard a waitress tell a truck driver she was pregnant with his child. And later, somewhere in Wyoming, a woman wouldn’t sell me cokes because “Indians in your car.” No, they’re Chinese. “Oh, in that case.” And before that, in Salt Lake City, the boys pumping gas did their work then, finished, rolled tires at us, godless hippies in their estimation. Later, we lived off Telegraph, Dwight near the corner store. I dropped acid. This was summer, nineteen seventy. Mostly local Coming is their signature In the archive of memory, a gallery’s set aside for it, shelves for motion, drawers for touch, hooks to hang categories of grasps and splays. Like Thoreau, mostly local, but a room for hotels and streets there to the right, just past those big jars of sheen, salt and sweet. How the sound of it is like a dog the way it cuts through all else. Only the sound, not the scent, and how beds are like boats pitching in the waving rooms, each windowsill a jetty’s edge.
Marriage Across a counter, that connection, instances of which run life to life, find their line. How smitten I was, how doubtful such a one could be courted. Yes, her sister said, write. Offspring were desired, so marriage loomed into view. I wrote the letter, projective prose, one could say. Sent, it garnered no firm commitment, but she returned in May and we married in late August, wanderers in the east. August found us living on the hillside above the stadium, a brief vestibule to marriage that gave us a first son, wanderer with his parents, imbiber of our wedding day champagne, who made his presence felt on the train near Edmonton. “I’m pregnant,” said with the certainty of an oldest sister. My whole life Facts open out to poetry, as they will. Wave and wave and wave and wave: what terrors, then, in the depths? Feet dangle, a phrase set loose, drifting toward a made-up abyss. A pen thrown sticks into a wall, nib and all, or penetrates the heart. Fifteen feet of grey cartilage, teeth visible in shallow water; grown men postpone their exercise. Don’t surf! (My whole life has been like this.) For years, I dreamt their dark shapes shot sideways in the rolling surf. The air is warm, not like here, black forms evident from above.
A borrowed staircase Oh marriage! What’s real and what isn’t? What lies between these poles, honesty and deception? Overrated, the one, and the other’s misconstrued that was mere awkwardness, the way ghosts emerge from walls and the dog though put away lingers, scents, sounds too prevalent to ignore. A borrowed staircase, anecdotes mingled with my own. How far we went on a fruitless errand, despite ample though belated coverage, a romp, pilfered wine. I gloss rather than copy prose, these phrases hitched together as a preface. Long runways end in wrecked and burning planes. A borrowed heaven, afterlives doubtful and we daren’t write. Names are dropped, fathers scorned. No issue. An ending. The path seems evident. Trudge another day amid stolid trees, winter coming, alone but for letters, visits, the spells broken then restored, the breaks, chasms, basins, geologic time inserted just because. Seems evident. Solidity is life despite sleep, sunlight. Barely a flicker, this thing haunting us then pausing, then manifest, cutting through in its peculiar way and taking over and over.
In Aix Blooms incongruous, thoughts arising the way bliss too appears. I used to want it, wrote it down among early January’s desires. In Aix when I felt it everywhere, despite loneliness. Words draw. It was May, fifteen years, some months away from now. The way bliss too disappears, cold descends in life. We build our huts. Wrapped in furs like old people, shamans, traders, amber in our pockets, bits of it floating in a kind of glass, once so viscous two fingers slid in, angling. There we were A yellow sofa surfaced and traffic, especially the buses. Not the ocean of another room. Distance is relative with another body. She liked kings but there we were, there it was. Under the bathroom light, a hole. The universe is rent and warped, the odds coming to mind, weighed. How to square these two things?
Melbourne poem A layer of white, crimson amid galleries your arms make. Eyes curved, gesture for the wings like Kabuki, a lip’s point, provocation. At the restaurant the maitre d’s tattoos overflowed formality; yours float and drift. A walk loosens the grip of things. Buildings tell time as we pass. The new ones will, you’ll find, future provisional, their stories your own, but my small chapter. Marked on the skin Winter counts, time marked on the skin, in dreams, times awake at four to the strikes a hammer makes, a spring of sorts that sings distantly. Winter counts, the streaks of chalk white that passion leaves, the human sounds, ends after starts, the beds made and torn, rented to use, one flesh again then separate and gone. Winter counts, stirring, ordinary time slowing minutely. A beach wet with foam then bleak, littered, windswept. Winter counts, ripples the day left shadowed.
About Common Place.
I started this personal journal in 2008 to collect things I wrote. Over time, it’s come to focus mainly on poems and sets of short prose pieces. The prose forms enough of a larger whole to be difficult to excerpt, but I’ve included a few examples. Diderot inspired me with his penchant for handing manuscripts around. These are manuscripts.
John J. Parman—pictured on the right in Singapore’s Botanical Garden—spent his childhood on that island. By the age of six, he had circled the globe by ship and train, an experience that made him a citizen of the cosmos, despite putting down roots in Berkeley, California, where he lives and writes. Educated in architecture, history, and city planning, he worked for 40 years as an editor and writer for successively larger design firms. In 1983, he founded an award-winning quarterly, Design Book Review, with his sister-in-law, Laurie Snowden, publishing it until 1999. He and his daughter, Elizabeth Snowden, are partners in Snowden & Parman, an editorial studio. He and U.C. Berkeley Professor Richard Bender have been writing partners more or less continuously since 1972. He is an editorial advisor of ARCADE, the Seattle design quarterly; the AR+D imprint of ORO Editions; Architect’s Newspaper; and Room One Thousand, the annual publication of graduate students at U.C. Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design, where he has been a visiting scholar since 2018. (Photo by Emily B. Marthinsen, FAIA.)
The photo-collages and photographs, with one exception, are made or taken by the writer.