Common Place No. 33 by John J. Parman

PROVISIONAL SELECTION No. 3 COMMON PLACE NO. 33 | WINTER 2021

This issue reproduces a manuscript I prepared for the Bergman Prize. It draws on a longer manuscript (see No. 30). Some poems that appeared there are here in revised form, but the thematic organization of the earlier selection is retained, slightly amended. The cover photo is the view west from an upstairs room in my house in Berkeley.

PROVISIONAL SELECTION NO. 3

The Pacific from Inverness Ridge.

Sonnets

Omaha Beach 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. 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.

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.”

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 at 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.

St John's Churchyard, Dudley, West Midlands (Sallyann Wright)

Nature, The Uncanny, The Gods, Fate

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.

What was spun Greens. Kitchens are a leitmotif, domestic notes that speak to how passion’s corralled as conception or more simply as a marriage, untrammeled. Fruits. Preserves are laid in. What was spun is woven. Questions are raised, complaints made: “Don’t explain to me.” Days. Her short, striped dress derails without intent. Happens. Another’s house is another’s. Even one’s own has ghosts. Rooms. It’s so small a place the spines’ titles can be read. Love’s recital in my mind: you bend and twist, moan. No issue, no harm done. Only poems get with child.

Terrains Bay trees leaning close to oaks: contagion spreads, is handed around. Blame comes in the mail, descends, heavy and opaque. Mice scamper. Wool’s spun. And cries edge close to coming, pass through terrains of hope, abandon. A long trek, the path fainter, no word, even dreams vacant.

A kind of sense Striations in my parenthetical life visible now and then, up close, unlike say an escarpment or great swathes of time set out publicly, whereas mine were self-contained and then expressed as gestures, elements brought forward in sequence, though varying, improvised, part of the songs I sang. It seems inconsequential now, the songs remembered but unsung. Tracing the ribbon of the scars, the blind may find a kind of sense. One could grieve, one could spit. Time briefly blinds us, then we walk out into day. Where we were is so much salt behind us now or lye. Acid in the face, a crevice dried up, these are time’s insults, some of them. We are parodies, I suppose. It’s out in the garden where we weed. There all along, our dissembling unnecessary, as naked we come, bristling at the touch. Fertile once. Her hair is chestnut still, as Stendhal observed. Bent slow, she regains youth as anecdotes take form. England’s not her native place, but then who claims to know where she belongs? Time has left her hair alone, an exception, a talisman like a Rhino’s horn, a lock for mortality’s key. A rise.

Mostly local In the archive of memory, a gallery’s set aside for it, shelves for motion, drawers for sound, hooks to hang categories of grasps, splays. Like Thoreau, mostly local, 'though rooms for hotels, the road, there to the right, just past the bowls of sheen, salt, sweet. How the sound of it is like a dog the way it cuts through all else. Only the sound, not the scent, the way beds are like boats, pitching in their waving rooms, the windowsill a jetty’s edge.

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 no longer here, although he thinks of her. She resisted description, he heard over coffee. She declined objectivity as pinned down, a specimen, and while he foreswore the rites, spring’s fecund air caught him out. Possession’s dance zero sums, transient, a comet. No doubt never figured in her thoughts, benign, a null. But then, null was where it always started. Ex nihilo, as they said. 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.

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 is not the one I ate alone: an oat scone, dark coffee with steamed milk. It was here we met, the eve of our sabbatical year. Later, there were phantoms, two of them to be precise. If one took possession of my wife, I heard a curse of sorts, half of one, a fourth. Both figure in the poems I wrote for them, not the ones where I'm alone. Who would notice? Birch and aspen are similar in the moonlight. Night joins and conjoins us— all are repossessed by sleep. Space proves random, barely speak unless they're ready. I wait. Across time I’m immortal, so never rushed. Beds are where the warp is felt, or one place.

So much else 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.

Spent on love In the afterlife, the two reenact how one waded in to save the other. This while their wives look on, marvel at the drama. So much work spent on love. One procreates or not, lives on detached, paints. The colors traipse in thin clouds, penciled lines a leitmotif, quotations as subtitles whispered as if to an ear just a tongue or two away. I listened, she says. Your seed propagated noisily.

Distant Oh Pioneer, your red tie, your Lenin badge, your brother— children of future-makers, heroes of non-fictional science, the circling space dog, cosmonauts taking flowers from golden-haired girls with bangs, the everyday gravity of Utopian ice cream and soda in shared glasses! In my bourgeois plot, spring holds Dystopia at bay. How distant we are from homes with their beautiful mothers, from promises made to us.

In memoriam, WB His suitcase disappeared. The grave, a stone rolled or a name reversed, gave away nothing. In my mind its contents converge, an end point opening out-not a particle but a wave.

Drew notice Close observation stirs up resonance, they say. A bird hunts for food across a deck. Myriad droplets of rain cover west-facing windows. Walking yesterday, the ferns drew her notice. Woods cut back bring them forward, she told me. The hills from here were outlines, dark against a lighter gray. Two corners away, more rain, 'though it had stopped when I left. With sport coat, no umbrella, a man crossed my path ahead as I neared the left turn home.

Myths on the side The world ordered in chaos, foreseen in dreams and omens, spoken as oracles, swayed almost incidentally, a god’s affection captured without intending, a truth perceived without one’s knowing. We set the myths on the side and leave the gods’ altars bare. We treat their world as ours, dismal stewards throwing crumbs. Days we take for granted pass unrecognized, fruit rotting in baskets, friendships squandered. Hermes appears nonetheless. Charon’s ferry plies the Styx. Near Hades’ gate, gathered shades gossip as they wait, looking for what they thought they had, death leaving little trace. Life’s short, the Muses sing. Art is long.

What we'll miss 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.

Times we failed to tarry Simple language, much emotion: it reached me here, an ocean and two land masses distant. To write is all that behooves her, she reports, a point consistent with prose that makes no claim. As the I Ching says, “No blame.” We live without foreknowledge, which may prompt writing out those times we failed to tarry. A big, familiar city is a redoubt compared to exile in a village. The vows made when we marry place us on an unseen ledge. Like a diary, the everyday. Like alleyways we stumble in that end blindly. Feel our way, hoping not to sense alarm. Looking back, the time it took; how it came anyway, the harm.

Write or speak In place, you could be in Shanghai, but in time you're proximate. Others are so distant that I'd need a clock set to ebb to uncover islands, find fields once fertile with possibilities. Shanghai can be lonely, empty, narrow and hard, warmth gone. One can live there exiled, driven not to long too much. A film took this up, theater of regret. In life, we write or speak. Walls and doors have messages in ink. Others are nowhere, vanished; fields are tilled by children now. I watch, write, dream at night, inverted, complicated dreams that play with every distance.

Walked or tramped Memory is matter and spirit, alive in our heads, Bergson said. Finches 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 dug or sketched to coax it into consciousness.

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 passion leaves, human sounds, ends after starts, beds made and torn, rented to use, one flesh again then separate and gone. Winter counts, slowing ordinary time's rhythm bodily, the beach wet and foamy, then bleak, littered and windswept. Winter counts, ripples the day left shadowed.

This morning A sketchbook view, taking in a grey streak or the way age sets in around her eyes, how her daughter is taller, a tot when I last saw her, chasing Robert’s dog. I’m older too in the same degree, lighter than I was, dressed in blue, a sweater against the cold despite the harbor’s glare. No mystery, I think, writing this out. Just my friend as she was this morning, there.

A banner In red, I think of her, red or some other solid hue. She glances from man to man in search of bona fides. Who will bring her a future to justify the effort? Red like a flag, a banner, a parade of one, waiting for a car, a text, a sign.

Melbourne poem A layer of white, crimson, a lip’s point's provocation. Tattoos float, drift. A walk loosens the grip of things. Buildings tell time as we pass, future provisional, their stories her own, but my small chapter.

Innocent No need for color, blank wings like shrouds later, folded up. Summer’s gift, working the garden, sun theirs while they have it, innocent of any ending.

The setting sun reflected in the Bay, as seen from an upstairs window.

Experience, Regret, Notations

Signs of crossing Rational life has doors, gates in hedges, shadows behind columns, other rooms. Irrational wraps her hair up, then slips. Time and space alter on both sides. Back’s another place, slowed clocks now rigorous, one touch so different from another. Lips and much else ache with memory. Later the ink’s a slightly different hue, words and lines colored, darkened, lightened. There’s no way to know. Each side’s a mystery to the other, but she bleeds in both, bears signs of crossing. Bears perhaps another, minutely sparked.

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: Will it satisfy you if I’m really gone? Chalk X below for bones, Y for where desire lived, circle for my empty head. Not far away as I measure lives.

In Aix 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 that heat dissipates and cold descends on us: we build our huts, wrapped in furs like old people, shamans, traders, amber in our pockets, bits of life floating in a kind of glass, once so viscous two fingers slid in, angling.

Glinting Novalis maintained that art reflected an idea. Does its necessity include a desire to impress? Men of the Heian Court wrote post-coital poems, an art sidestepping criticism. The aim of which, Benjamin wrote early on, is to free the future from the present’s deformations. It must be perfect. Somewhere up ahead orgasms are unsurpassed in every possible sense. I am the necessary man, many a noble thought, gathering up his garments while his lover tidied up. But an idea eludes me just now. Perhaps a nap. Then I’ll write something apt. Inspiration will come to me as from Heaven or if not, I’ll find a Chinese model, something about a phoenix or a flashing carp, glinting brightly as it leaves the depths.

Gallant Travel is a dream that we put off as long as possible, like flagging down a hearse to ride in cars we used to hail by app. We walk, masks ragged from overuse, hair like some garden's neglected topiaries. Cars are scarce; there are vans, young men with masks, packages bought, takeout fetched, women with dogs, women with kids. We step out onto the street, gallant as they eye us over masks of colored, patterned cloth, kids uncovered, and we who should have been in Naples are out with them taking the air that is admittedly clearer than it’s been for ages, houses on distant hills visible again. We wave on getting up, blush to remove our bedclothes without the smog, wonder how it will be when Mammon flips the switch, the birdsong plundered by the rushing trains, trucks, motorbikes, sirens, by society and its calendar, a corner table, beauty close and sotto voce.

Not ceasing Little escapes us if we listen. Love's ceasing is not love's ceasing. Nothing's lost. Mute's as good as whispered, blows are struck as before, words find their places, the voice still hers who spoke, may speak, may decline to speak. An emptiness is a garden; is intimate speech, silent as roses the color of persimmon jam; is lavender dried and bundled, faintly bearing the giver's scent.

My versions The deep throb of ships, cats asleep, the easel standing, how I slipped in and out of it, how it disappeared, how it’s folded now into memory. This is my version. Yours, his, those of others may differ, but I was there filming it in my head. 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 nature grants our species. This is another. The curtains billowed when the wind came up. I’m fairly sure that happened.

Only the sense The room is strewn and then each item is retrieved so that only the sense of you lingers. Bits and pieces of flesh cohere in service of this gathering in. Yes, I thought, I dream of this. I woke thinking how acts condemn us. How we are what they say we are, even in dreams. And yet remorse follows us there. Everything is laden. If I were free, if I were unafraid, we would cohere, we would part, burning our letters behind us or maybe not. I have no theory on this point, only practice with its dreadful weight.

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. Thereafter, 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.

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.

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?

Malleable Peel away the clothes: how malleable the form our bodies take, taking, taken. Disregard the flesh: how malleable the mind that rides on top or is ridden. Ignore the genders: how malleable the sex, like the mind’s root or one of them. Take care of the self: how malleable the heart. “Nothing is lost,” the I Ching said.

What the day will bring Deaf and blind share things, fail to note or overlook how she wants or desires, and he wonders what clothes will suit. The days grow shorter, a cliché given seasonally and remarked on. Darkness is something she puts on, but still sees, the paradox desire needs. All in time— time wobbles in its axial frame. He sinks into sleep at two or three. She's bothered most at other hours, craves the things she craves. Siesta Hotel opens out onto brothels, their sofas rhythmic with her hungers, sating though days tighten imperceptibly, the gaps of longing growing longer. She wonders what the day will bring. He puts his clothes on in an order, wavers inside those trappings, keys in pockets—doors and cars, a case once filled with things she wants. "Put away long ago," another said, but no, they live on in her head.

Waiting How women move is a reason to wait. They are in every case distinct, but you are you. To wait is to remember this— not to move on, but recollect. I put her apron on, pretend to be a woman. If I wait long enough, I’ll come as one. I’m devoted as a mare, the I Ching says, but my mind is like a dressing room in the Kabuki Theater. I dreamt a kind of purifying dream. More often, I’m failing to catch a flight— my suitcase half empty, my clothes in disarray. Always the same city, yet it makes no sense. My parents appear, although they’re dead. Being dead, they never reach their destination. I vowed to stay here to the very end, waiting games, the last of it, like slabs first, then we decay. Will you attend? The odds aren’t good.

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.

A memory Marriage banns were not read twice. A distance traveled and then this. Mark how life takes down desire, persistent in its nostalgic form, bliss a memory of skin rubbed raw, bathed in warm agony afterward, a payment for afternoons on borrowed sheets. Like saint's days for a bride of Christ, stations, as the Church has it, mark where those small deaths led. Crossing leaves us only silence except in dreams. On floors, the moon's traces reminisce.

How it was Monsters have their topics, how it was out on the plains. They roll their cigarettes and measure ankles in their heads, the distance covered, the sounds evoked. A table’s more a surface than a divide, and the pull of physicality is so odd: you swear it off and there it is again.

Half in, half out Reading Pessoa in August, tomatoes ripening as the vines dry out, the race against the goddess's return to ground. It leaves her half in, half out, not like Europa, astride her bull, a continent to name and populate, Neanderthals' claims notwithstanding. To Pessoa this striding, this tragic displacement, were only a tram's metallic screams, rain on Lisbon streets, each morning memorably like the last. For Europa never graced his bed. Zeus too had fled.

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. You said it was the thing you liked.

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 if there's 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).

Souvenirs Falling in with regret or falling out of love, regretting this. (Love fares badly under siege.) Regret falls silently, reproach for all reproachable things we bring along, souvenirs out of love, derived from it or carried as memories. Time we swam in once or waded through, soaked to excess and caught out, tapped. Life opens out, closes in. Regrets aren’t even texts, there being no recipients. Ruled out. Numbers only come to mind, of phone, year of birth, of day and month. Names drift and somewhere pianos go untuned or, if tuned, evoke the memory of tuning.

Three variations on a yellow sofa Traffic all night, I remember. “Marry me” had its symmetry. Nothing that can’t be justified by brain chemistry. Wears off. No and no, and so, no and no. A Chanel outfit in a photo. Congress, they used to call it. Congress is one word for it, desire needing a room, horizontality. Children float at the edge, as potential. Welcome them, the Church teaches. Lever in a way, forcing the issue, hounding bliss, if that word can be used, the fog of hours we spend in bed, myopia. It would be better if time kept crawling or even stopped like Rockefeller’s heart. (Better for him but not better for her.) Who will clear a path? No one, I conclude. 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?

A borrowed staircase Oh marriage! What is real and what isn’t? What lies between those 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 is put away, yet 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, those 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. Seemed evident. Solidity is life despite sleep, is sun. Barely a flicker, this thing haunting us then pausing. Sensed sometimes, cutting through in its peculiar way and taking over and over.

Unruffled Panoply of forms—she shifts, another writes in Polish. Shifts, one thin, one thick, a race, a truce with love, a truce with them, student days coming to an end. Hope seeps into texts. Desire mixes with contempt. Men. What Polish words describe how women are in bed? Who is this, before a wall, floor held despite their gaze? One wafts, I think; the other’s gravity turns off and on. Horses roll. The Polish rider unruffled sits, some distance from authority, wanting (well, not him). Saddle sore come Monday, one confides. Heft rolled her close to death. The Polish rider looks away. Whose gravity, then? We must rewrite things to account, theorize when there’s no proof, touch the root, the spot, roof or seat, fount, spout. These are not romantic words. Forms follow function as nights betray the days.

All this A layered life, women loved in sequence and in parallel, families vying unknowing for primacy as marriages were ventured. All this across two decades. I wrap it up in golden tissue, layers meant to obscure the marks such living leaves, deep blue in places, like the stripes of fish caught after a struggle, their radiance muted.

Barely felt Possessions stuffed into weekend bags, a watch around his wrist, their car cooling from the drive. Dressed in summer wear for this cliffside place, they bring their expectations along. And from them, arguments. Later, a child, brought back barely felt, all that they possess a bit heavier, tipped ahead.

Art and ephemera in the same upstairs room.

Notes

"Drew notice" was published in West Marin Review 10 under the title "Close observation." "Myths on the Side" was published in Little River 8, edited by Katherine Osborne, under the title, "The world ordered in chaos."

Educated in architecture and planning, John J. Parman worked in those fields for four decades. In 1983, he founded Design Book Review with Laurie Snowden, publishing it until 1999. He is an advisor to three design periodicals and the research imprint of ORO Editions. He is a partner in an editorial studio with Elizabeth Snowden, and a visiting scholar at U.C. Berkeley's College of Environmental Design, where he was a lecturer in the 1980s. He lives and works in Berkeley, California.