Ianuarius

Recently she said, “Save water?   For one thing, you men can start pissing in the sink”

She wears culottes and ombre-patterned silk tops with velvet godets

When she’s off her Texas Spanish, she affects a slightly urban upspeak

She says she wants to go to Bora-Bora and Morea, to Seville, to Uruguay

But next she wants to go to Basel to be there pre-dawn that Monday morning next month for the Morgenstreich, when Basler Fastchnacht begins

But she turns on a dime when she evanesces, so in February it might be to Maui or Jamaica or Caracas or anywhere

She travels to Caracas often, sometimes just for a long weekend

President Chavez, calls himself a pardo, that he defines as a brown-skinned person with traces of Indian blood, curly hair, Chinese-looking eyes, a thick mouth and an aquiline nose.   The mantuanos are the Euro-looking elite

She boasts that most of her Venezuelan friends are pardos

She showed up yesterday humming Nobody Does It Better, and the other day was singing Touch Me in the Morning doing her Diana Ross best to hit in her high registers

That strange self-consciousness, quasi-adolescent in its thrust, of an independent and competent solitary stance turned to flirty-cutsie-girlie-babe on a whim

As though she reaches back between her shoulders and flips a toggle switch

With a slot machine sense of resolve in her eyes

She lives to travel, is persistently restless in New York

She once stood accidentally in front of Herbert von Karajan’s apartment in Megave and she knocked

When von Karajan discovered, in 1942, that his wife was half Jewish, immediately he divorced her

The first train of Belgian Jews left for Auschwitz on August 4, 1942

Paul de Man was writing for pro-Nazi newspapers until at least October, 1942

Houseflies in the Swiss DC-10 that had been in West Africa before leaving Zarich for Newark

The water gardens of Andalusia

“I was surprised when he won the Nobel Prize because he’s always told me that nobody reads him”

Vivid women, evenings, mornings, afternoons

One after the other up and down busy streets, flashes of eye contact recognition, often then they laugh and smile

Smiles taken like the serene and exhilarating act of glimpsing steep nearby mountains on clear days from the noisy intensity of Los Angeles, Tehran, Phoenix, or any of the immense cities flanking the Andean cordillera

Jouissance

Nielsen’s compelling fourth, the Inextinguishable, his Third, the Expansiva, and then his Maskarade Overture

The classic basket form, from rim down, is, border, slew, wale, rand, fitch, stake, by-stake, end of by-stake, and foot

Yellow dock, smartweed, knotweed, alligator weed, goosefoot, halogeton

Sida, klamathweed, bindweed, dodders, henbit, horehound, jimsonweed, mullein, plantain, nightshade

A serene affability among the common mergansers on the wild, placid Rio Grande Gorge above Pilar

Merganser hens rest, like Winslow Homer’s parasol belles, on big black river rocks eyeing the white-green brilliant red-billed males zipping around in the current upstream and down

The great river of the North American Southwest draining toward the Ciudad Juarez-to-Matamoros agony travail of border Mexico

Everything touches everything else in this insouciantly cruel era

Reseda, manzanita, dry-slope greens

By 2070, all of Latin America will be mainly Evangelical Protestant

In 2040, one in three in the US will be Hispanic

Already in 2012, most Mormons will be speaking Spanish

Richard Rodriguez calls himself Aztec orange defying the five US Census racial classifications

In post-Wasp America

Where things play in first person first-name quasi personal

Latin America was Catholic villages, now it is Protestant cities of the “I”

“We” Catholics.   “I” Protestants.   Yo, yo, yo

“Yo Indio” is an impossible phrase in Mexico

In the way that, as Brodsky said, “It’s impossible to speak illogically in English”

Who have we been is what we have always cast ourselves to be, the small pox and bounty fees, our self-righteous Christian land-grab sadistic militancy

We are who we have been during and who we are now

With the Sangre de Cristos, big snow mountains, dominating New Mexico like a monument

White pine, jack pine, pitch pine, slash pine, Scotch pine, bristlecone, lodgepole, limber pine, ponderosa

Rising almost forlornly over the filled-in continent

Above the noisy swarm intelligence of the sprawl

Serried tract-housing treeless grids on cursive cul-de-sacs, thin doors of chipboard houses sited oblivious to the land, absurd decorative details and grotesque black plastic-bag barricaded and ceramic-bit drained landscaping, modular spaced suburban vistas, suspicious neighbors, shopping mall destinations in hogwagon SUVs, sodium vapor nights, dreary expectations

Carpetweed, purslane, chickweed, shepherd’s purse, pepperweed, bur clover, locoweed, black medick, beggarweed, sourgrass, puncture vine, bull nettle, poison ivy, poverty weed, pigweed, poke

In the parking lot at the south end of Tinicum Marsh across I-95 from the Philadelphia airport where at six o’clock on a summer Sunday morning, sits a maroon van with New York plates, two people asleep inside, windows up, a wet strawberry, raspberry or cherry flavored condom in the dust outside

A pickup arrives, local plates, two men with spinning rods and buckets get out

The two in the van, indeterminate gender, sit up, light cigarettes, remain there behind the glass many minutes before driving off

Morton Homestead just up the road from there, Swedish with Anglo modifications, dates to the 1650s, a ferry house for the old Darby Creek to Tinicum Island crossing

It started in the 1600s, what we were and who we are now

All blanked out and circumscribed now by the noise from I-95

It began from places like the Morton Homestead ferry house of Finns and Swedes

Who came to the Delaware Valley before most of the Dutch and all of the English

Where Swedish stone churches and low-roofed farmsteads lay quietly and unobtrusively on the land, now the sprawl

We justify ourselves now with selfish rationalizing and evasive cant that banalizes and demeans our very presence on the land

And don’t even have one clear, truthful, respectfully honest image of ourselves

Not one clean symbol as true as the famous Six Nation headdress, a clear representation of a perched gray squirrel, its brush curled snug atop its head