I try to act amazed, but it's an act, the movie may be new, but it's the same soundtrack

Hillsville, Virginia

graham parker "local girls"

There may be mermaids under the wharf, there may even be a man in the moon, ah but Vincent time is running out, I hope you get yourself together soon

Yoko Ono, Austinsville, VA

a few lines from Charles Simic's notebooks~

Once again, I find myself on the North Pole. I have no sled, no dogs and I'm dressed for bed. You ask me if I'm cold? Of course I'm cold, you idiots.

I traveled over some bad roads in my childhood. It's no wonder I have a few loose screws.

I remember a small boy saying in the lull between two waves of planes during a bombing raid: "I want to go pipi, Mama."

Riding on a sow, holding on to its ears and shouting, "Out of my way chickens!" Did I really do that?

I like to hear a happy tune played sadly.

The new American Dream is to get to be very rich and still be regarded as a victim.

Did solitary strollers whistle past graveyards in Cotton Mather's time, or were they as silent as the graves?

Old woman stammering excuses to the pigeons for frightening them.

"God has a plan for America," the preacher on TV said just as you came to bed carrying a bowl of cherries against your naked breasts.

At the tanning salon on Route 9, Regina, the Pizza Hut girl, lies naked with shades on.

The magician folded the sheet of paper with my question over and over until no trace of it was left in his hand.

I remember my father saying, "Let's have another bottle of wine so that when we rise from the table we can feel the earth turning under our feet."

It happens that a cricket enters an abandoned house at the end of a road rarely traveled to sing as the night is falling.

A sign in Alabama. Love Power Church. Music and Miracles.

M Ward "Vincent O'Brien"

Once I saw him in the moonlight, when the bats were 'a flying, I saw the werewolf, and the werewolf was crying

Cave, Austinsville, VA

--a couple videos for Halloween

Scout Niblett & Will Oldham "Kiss"


Cat Power "Werewolf" (Michael Hurley cover)

I don't want to hear a sad story, full of heartbreak and desire, the last time I felt like this, I was in the wilderness, and the caynon was on fire.

Interstate-77, Austinsville, Virginia

~2 poems by Larry Levis

In a Country

My love and I are inventing a country, which we
can already see taking shape, as if wheels were
passing through yellow mud. But there is a prob-
lem: if we put a river in the country, it will thaw
and begin flooding. If we put the river on the bor-
der, there will be trouble. If we forget about the
river, there will be no way out. There is already a
sky over that country, waiting for clouds or smoke.
Birds have flown into it, too. Each evening more
trees fill with their eyes, and what they see we can
never erase.

One day it was snowing heavily, and again we were
lying in bed, watching our country: we could
make out the wide river for the first time, blue and
moving. We seemed to be getting closer; we saw
our wheel tracks leading into it and curving out
of sight behind us. It looked like the land we had
left, some smoke in the distance, but I wasn't sure.
There were birds calling. The creaking of our
wheels. And as we entered that country, it felt as if
someone was touching our bare shoulders, lightly,
for the last time.

After the Blue Note Closes

Tonight, holding a stranger in my arms—
Suddenly a downpour, a late
Summer storm. I thought of you, alone or
Not alone in that distant city,
And at that hour when the punk musicians’ bars,
And the carpeted bars,
With their well-coiffed, careful clienteles,
Are closing—
Those strangers pairing off at last & each desiring
What little mercy the other can
Afford. That
Wasted breath of neon light a frail
Tattoo or come on in pools
Of rain. That street. That rain.
No. Our street. Our rain. Holding her, not you,
I watched it finally
Empty, watched until the streaked,
Reddening light of dawn came back & touched
The quiet brick of empty dance halls, touched,
Behind blackened tavern windows, a girl’s cast off
Blouse; touched even the pocked faces of musicians
On the posters there: Sick Girl;
The Misstakes—almost as if dawn light could
Hold all things, each piece
Of shattered glass, as if to bless them somehow,
Or make them whole again.
It can’t, or won’t.
And it is late for blessings: All night
I’ve held a woman who,
Tomorrow, I will not want to see again, & who,
Tomorrow, probably will feel the same
For me. And so, at last, the two of us
Will have something in common:
A slight embarrassment, or,
Someday in winter, passing on a street,
A quick, amused glance before
We turn away.
I don’t expect much anymore; or else
That city is so far away by now it seems
Made of great light, & distance,
Even though it was, mostly, only a house
Like any other, lit at dinnertime
By human speech, the oldest of stories; something
In common. I remember now,
After scolding him,
The precise & careful way
My two year old son once offered me
The crust of his own bread, holding it out
So solemnly, as if it mattered, holding it
With great care.

a toot on your horn, a flash of your brights, honk if you're lonely tonight

Honk, Pulaski, VA

~3 by James Tate

Back to Nature

You should drive a big red convertible as fast as you can
into the heart of the forest, drink champagne, and say
witty things to all the creatures you meet.

Walk around kicking your tires, and if you meet any
of those endangered Camp Fire Girls, say Wohelo!

Don't you wish you had remembered to pack the pemmican!

If you pull out a white handkerchief you will almost certainly
be mistaken for a deer and shot.

Don't forget to put the top up if it rains.

When you are lost stay where you are.

Sleep is an excellent method for tracking down the jewel thieves.

When you roll over never let your body touch the ground.

Goodtime Jesus

Jesus got up one day a little later than usual. He had been dream-
ing so deep there was nothing left in his head. What was it?
A nightmare, dead bodies walking all around him, eyes rolled
back, skin falling off. But he wasn't afraid of that. It was a beau-
tiful day. How 'bout some coffee? Don't mind if I do. Take a little
ride on my donkey, I love that donkey. Hell, I love everybody.

The Parade and After the Parade

The parade was a sad little affair,
three or four tiny witches, a pirate,
a Dalmatian, a black cat, a pair of dice.
There was not even a band or a baton.
A single police car led and the rest of us
community-minded cream puffs maundered around
hoping the spirit would strike us.
A cockroach was talking to a hula-goddess
and nibbling on her lace bodice.
It was a dark day downtown
as we drifted off in space.
And then we returned to our houses
and sat down and cried into our hands,
something about not having had a mother
or a father, and this didn't make us
a freak of nature or anything, and I
patted you on the head and we stared
out the window at the uncoming necessary risks,
an activity we liked very much.
It was like walking at night with a baby
or falling asleep on a donkey
and spitting off a cliff. Otherwise,
we have pretty much forsaken popular hobbies,
such as wearing camouflage in a forest of stray thoughts.

Tell me friend if you've got the time, where in this woods does grow the healing vine?

Eagle, Sylvatus, VA

Michael Hurley, "The Rue of Ruby Whores," from Weatherhole


On my way home from work tonight (or about 1 in the morning, really), a gunpowder grey cat darted in front of my pickup just as John Fogerty wailed, "things got bad and things got worse, i guess you know the tune." I think I know the tune, I told John. But, still, the cat seemed like a good omen.

Like an arrow, I was only passing through

Sunset in Window, Radford, VA

~3 poems by Czeslaw Milosz

Encounter

We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.
A red wing rose in the darkness.

And suddenly a hare ran across the road.
One of us pointed to it with his hand.

That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive,
Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.

O my love, where are they, where are they going
The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.
I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.

So Little

I said so little.
Days were short.

Short days.
Short nights.
Short years.

I said so little.
I couldn't keep up.

My heart grew weary
From joy,
Despair,
Ardor,
Hope.

The jaws of Leviathan
Were closing upon me.

Naked, I lay on the shores
Of desert islands.

The white whale of the world
Hauled me down to its pit.

And now I don't know
What in all that was real.

Esse

I looked at that face, dumbfounded. The lights of métro stations flew by; I didn't notice them. What can be done, if our sight lacks absolute power to devour objects ecstatically, in an instant, leaving nothing more than the void of an ideal form, a sign like a hieroglyph simplified from the drawing of an animal or bird? A slightly snub nose, a high brow with sleekly brushed-back hair, the line of the chin - but why isn't the power of sight absolute? - and in a whiteness tinged with pink two sculpted holes, containing a dark, lustrous lava. To absorb that face but to have it simultaneously against the background of all spring boughs, walls, waves, in its weeping, its laughter, moving it back fifteen years, or ahead thirty. To have. It is not even a desire. Like a butterfly, a fish, the stem of a plant, only more mysterious. And so it befell me that after so many attempts at naming the world, I am able only to repeat, harping on one string, the highest, the unique avowal beyond which no power can attain: I am, she is. Shout, blow the trumpets, make thousands-strong marches, leap, rend your clothing, repeating only: is!

She got out at Raspail. I was left behind with the immensity of existing things. A sponge, suffering because it cannot saturate itself; a river, suffering because reflections of clouds and trees are not clouds and trees.

Yesterday I talked with my father, he said that we could never win. It’s so hard to tell where I end, and my father begins.

Peek Creek, Pulaski, VA

Wheeling Motel
--Franz Wright

The vast waters flow past its back yard.
You can purchase a six-pack in bars!
Tammy Wynette’s on the marquee

a block down. It’s twenty-five years ago:
you went to death, I to life, and
which was luckier God only knows.

There’s this line in an unpublished poem of yours.
The river is like that,
a blind familiar.

The wind will die down when I say so;
the leaden and lessening light on
the current.

Then the moon will rise
like the word reconciliation,
like Walt Whitman examining the tear on a dead face.

Youth
--James Wright

Strange bird,
His song remains secret.
He worked too hard to read books.
He never heard how Sherwood Anderson
Got out of it, and fled to Chicago, furious to free himself
From his hatred of factories.
My father toiled fifty years
At Hazel-Atlas Glass,
Caught among girders that smash the kneecaps
Of dumb honyaks.
Did he shudder with hatred in the cold shadow of grease?
Maybe. But my brother and I do know
He came home as quiet as the evening.

He will be getting dark, soon,
And loom through new snow.
I know his ghost will drift home
To the Ohio River, and sit down, alone,
Whittling a root.
He will say nothing.
The waters flow past, older, younger
Than he is, or I am.

I love winners when they cry, losers when they try, music when it's good, and life

Pepsi Machine, Hillsville, VA

--paragraph from John Williams' Stoner

In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart.

The boy looked at Johnny, Johnny wanted to run, but the movie kept moving as planned

Untitled, Sylvatus, VA

Patti Smith--Land: Horses, Land of A Thousand Dances, La Mer (de) + Film clips from The Tracey Fragments

All my friends are funeral singers

Wedding Dress in Window, Pulaski, VA

Lines For Winter
--Mark Strand

Tell yourself
as it gets cold and gray falls from the air
that you will go on
walking, hearing
the same tune no matter where
you find yourself --
inside the dome of dark
or under the cracking white
of the moon's gaze in a valley of snow.
Tonight as it gets cold
tell yourself
what you know which is nothing
but the tune your bones play
as you keep going. And you will be able
for once to lie down under the small fire
of winter stars.
And if it happens that you cannot
go on or turn back and you find yourself
where you will be at the end,
tell yourself
in that final flowing of cold through your limbs
that you love what you are.

Nights In Hackett's Cove
--Mark Strand

Those nights lit by the moon and the moon's nimbus,
the bones of the wrecked pier rose crooked in the air
and the sea wore a coat of tarnished silver.
The black pines waited. The cold air smelled
of fishheads rotting under the pier at low tide.
The moon kept shedding its silver clothes
over the bogs and pockets of bracken.
Those nights I would gaze at the bay road,
at the cottages clustered under the moon's immaculate stare,
nothing hinted that I would suffer so late
this turning away, this longing to be there.

Small Comfort
--Kath Pollitt

Coffee and cigarettes in a clean cafe,
forsythia lit like a damp match against
a thundery sky drunk on its own ozone,

the laundry cool and crisp and folded away
again in the lavender closet-too late to find
comfort enough in such small daily moments

of beauty, renewal, calm, too late to imagine
people would rather be happy than suffering
and inflicting suffering. We're near the end,

but O before the end, as the sparrows wing
each night to their secret nests in the elm's green dome
O let the last bus bring

love to lover, let the starveling
dog turn the corner and lope suddenly
miraculously, down its own street, home.

What I Understood
--Kath Pollitt

When I was a child I understood everything
about, for example, futility. Standing for hours
on the hot asphalt outfield, trudging for balls
I'd ask myself, how many times will I have to perform
this pointless task, and all the others? I knew
about snobbery, too, and cruelty—for children
are snobbish and cruel—and loneliness: in restaurants
the dignity and shame of solitary diners
disabled me, and when my grandmother
screamed at me, "Someday you'll know what it's like!"
I knew she was right, the way I knew
about the single rooms my teachers went home to,
the pictures on the dresser, the hoard of chocolates,
and that there was no God, and that I would die.
All this I understood, no one needed to tell me.
the only thing I didn't understand
was how in a world whose predominant characteristics
are futility, cruelty, loneliness, disappointment
people are saved every day
by a sparrow, a foghorn, a grassblade, a tablecloth.
This year I'll be
thirty-nine, and I still don't understand it.

Even though we all dance sometimes to a song we don’t love like we should

Richard and Marilyn, Hillsville, VA

My Heart
--Frank O'Hara

I 'm not going to cry all the time
nor shall I laugh all the time
I don't prefer one "strain" to another.
I'd have the immediacy of a bad movie,
not just a sleeper, but also the big,
overproduced first-run kind. I want to be
at least as alive as the vulgar. And if
some aficionado of my mess says " That's
not like Frank! , all to the good! I
don't wear brown and grey suits all the time,
do I? NO. I wear workshirts to the opera,
often. I want my feet to be bare,
I want my face to be shaven, and my heart-
you can't plan on my heart, but
the better part of it like my poetry, is open.

Today
--Frank O'Hara

Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas!
You really are beautiful! Pearls,
harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins! all
the stuff they've always talked about

still makes a poem a surprise!
These things are with us every day
even on beachheads and biers. They
do have meaning. They're strong as rocks.

Animals
--Frank O'Hara

Have you forgotten what we were like then
when we were still first rate
and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth

it's no use worrying about Time
but we did have a few tricks up our sleeves
and turned some sharp corners

the whole pasture looked like our meal
we didn't need speedometers
we could manage cocktails out of ice and water

I wouldn't want to be faster
or greener than now if you were with me O you
were the best of all my days

I was just tryin' to paint a picture for you. But the canvas was cracked, the colors untrue

Untitled, Erwin, TN

Everything And Nothing
--Borges

THERE was no one in him; behind his face (which even through the bad paintings of those times resembles no other) and his words, which were copious, fantastic and stormy, there was only a bit of coldness, a dream dreamt by no one. At first he thought that all people were like him, but the astonishment of a friend to whom he had begun to speak of this emptiness showed him his error and made him feel always that an individual should not differ in outward appearance. Once he thought that in books he would find a cure for his ill and thus he learned the small Latin and less Greek a contemporary would speak of; later he considered that what he sought might well be found in an elemental rite of humanity, and let himself be initiated by Anne Hathaway one long June afternoon. At the age of twenty-odd years he went to London. Instinctively he had already become proficient in the habit of simulating that he was someone, so that others would not discover his condition as no one; in London he found the profession to which he was predestined, that of the actor, who on a stage plays at being another before a gathering of people who play at taking him for that other person. His histrionic tasks brought him a singular satisfaction, perhaps the first he had ever known; but once -the last verse had been acclaimed and the last dead man withdrawn from the stage, the hated flavour of unreality returned to him. He ceased to be Ferrex or Tamberlane and became no one again. Thus hounded, he took to imagining other heroes and other tragic fables. And so, while his flesh fulfilled its destiny as flesh in the taverns and brothels of London, the soul that inhabited him was Caesar, who disregards the augur's admonition, and Juliet. who abhors the lark, and Macbeth, who converses on the plain with the witches who are also Fates. No one has ever been so many men as this man who like the Egyptian Proteus could exhaust all the guises of reality. At times he would leave a confession hidden away in some corner of his work, certain that it would not be deciphered; Richard affirms that in his person he plays the part of many and Iago claims with curious words 'I am not what I am'. The fundamental identity of existing, dreaming and acting inspired famous passages of his.

For twenty years he persisted in that controlled hallucination, but one morning he was suddenly gripped by the tedium and the terror of being so many kings who die by the sword and so many suffering lovers who converge, diverge and melodiously expire. That very day he arranged to sell his theatre. Within.. a week he had returned to his native village, where he recovered the trees and rivers of his childhood and did not relate them to the others his muse had celebrated, illustrious with mythological allusions and Latin terms. He had to be 'someone: he was a retired impresario who had made his fortune and concerned himself with loans, lawsuits and petty usury. It was in this character that he dictated the arid will and testament known to us, from which he deliberately excluded all traces of pathos or literature. His friends from London would visit his retreat and for them he would take up again his role as poet.

History adds that before or after dying he found himself in the presence of God and told Him: 'I who have been so many men in vain want to be one and myself.' The voice of the Lord answered from a whirlwind: 'Neither am I anyone; I have dreamt the world as you dreamt your work, my Shakespeare, and among the forms in my dream are you, who like myself are many and no one.'

She says, I'll talk to strangers if I want to, 'cause I'm a stranger here, too.

Drink Coca-Cola, Labor Day Gun Show and Flea-Market, Hillsville, VA

Listen to Chris Smither...then seek out Don't It Drag On and I'm a Stranger Here, Too

There will be no end soon

Labor Day Gun Show and Flea-Market, Hillsville, VA

Tear It Down
--Jack Gilbert

We find out the heart only by dismantling what
the heart knows. By redefining the morning,
we find a morning that comes just after darkness.
We can break through marriage into marriage.
By insisting on love we spoil it, get beyond
affection and wade mouth-deep into love.
We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars.
But going back toward childhood will not help.
The village is not better than Pittsburgh.
Only Pittsburgh is more than Pittsburgh.
Rome is better than Rome in the same way the sound
of raccoon tongues licking the inside walls
of the garbage tub is more than the stir
of them in the muck of the garbage. Love is not
enough. We die and are put into the earth forever.
We should insist while there is still time. We must
eat through the wildness of her sweet body already
in our bed to reach the body within that body.

Years and Years and Years Later
--Dan Albergotti

From this distance he can see that the man
is not Jack Gilbert. And he is not yet himself.
Being himself would not be better than being Gilbert.
Only Gilbert is more than Gilbert. Failure is better
than success in the same way that this poem
is still getting at something as it descends
into parody, elegy, and palimpsest at once.
We die and are put into the earth forever
is a line directly stolen from Gilbert’s “Tear It Down.”
Putting it in this poem means neither success
nor failure nor larceny. People need to read it
even if its magnitude of beauty is too difficult
for people. When I spoke with Jack on the telephone
to invite him to my university the next fall, he mostly
wanted to talk about my Italian name, to ask about
my poems. He wanted to know what I wanted
from poetry. I said I’d like to say something
to someone born two hundred years from now.
I think he approved, or I may have just heard
his enormously generous spirit smiling.
After his summer in Greece with Linda,
he could not remember ever having talked to me,
told my colleague who called to make travel arrangements
that he had never heard of our university.
Today the woman I love rejected my artificial soul.
What is it we want from poetry? When Jack Gilbert
and I have been put into the earth forever,
what will it mean if someone reads “Tear It Down” or
“Years and Years and Years Later”? Is there still time
to insist? Let my heart be feral, too wild for every
woman I love. This poem, Jack, is as helpless
as crushed birds, and still I say with you, nevertheless.

I've walked down life's lonely highways, hand-in-hand with myself

Untitled, Sylvatus, VA

Interesting video for Bonnie "Prince" Billy's "How About Thank You"

"Where you came from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it."--Hazel Motes in Wise Blood

It's been such a long time, we should grease up this watch of mine

Phone Cards, Raphine, VA

Can you deny there's nothing greater, nothing more than the travelling hands of time?

Time, Labor Day Gun Show and Flea Market, Hillsville, VA

John Darnielle (Mountain Goats) interviewed about his upcoming album, The Life of the World To Come. Every song on the album references a particular Bible verse. We've been reading Flannery O'Connor in my American Lit. class, and much of what Darnielle has to say dovetails nicely with O'Connor's stories of spiritual affliction.

Pitchfork: How does the sentiment of the chorus relate to the story of the verses?

JD: There's a number of different ways of feeling holy and connected with God. One way you can get really close to God is to sin as hard as you can. Because there's only one person, in theory, who can save you from that. His whole job, in a sense, is to absolve you of sin, to forgive you of sin. You're not supposed to, but you can test God by doing a lot of terrible things. If you directly intend to offend him, though, it would probably be the most direct, in a sense-- this is kind of Hare Krishna stuff, where they talk about the different ways you can stand with God. One is as a lover, but another is as His enemy. Because when you are engaging with someone in a position of enmity, that is also a very intimate relationship.

So these people are doing some bad things and one of them, the one who sins, is sort of experiencing a connection to God in the depths of his degradation-- which I think is almost a universal experience. When do you cry out to the God you don't believe in? When you hit bottom. That's the moment at which you are going to sort of know Him best. I don't even know, when I say Him, if I should put it in quotes or not, because I don't want to sound like I'm actually saying that. But I'm also saying that your ideas of God will come to rest upon you in your moment of profoundest degradation, which is kind of what that song is about.

Pitchfork: In the Bible, Genesis 3:23 is a verse about being cast out of the Garden of Eden. What you just described does not sound very much like a Garden of Eden.

JD: Well, everything's Edenic. Everything is. I really don't know what your past is like, but I've got to assume, like everyone else, you have plenty of pain in it, right? But when you go back to the places where the pain was at, you find that there was more stuff there, and that there's stuff about it that you miss just because it's you. Because that's who you were, and you grow to accept that. When you do that kind of stuff, whether it's Eden or not, it is. Every place that you left is Eden in some way.

I've been in fear of sounding portentous when talking about this record, but when you're starting with Biblical concepts, that can be a delicate balancing act. If you're trying to do heavy stuff, it' s hard not to come off portentous, but that might be how it comes out.

Here's Darnielle performing "Jeff Davis County Blues" at the First Unitarian Church in Philadelphia

We drifted over the sea, where it hurts too much to look, it hurts to try and see

Vessel, Labor Day Gun Show and Flea Market, Hillsville, VA

2 by Andrei Codrescu

sea sickness

dancers strapped to canoes is
what the morning brings. they are tied
to a perpetual dance.
hooded folks in lighthouses
count on their fingers as the day
gets brighter, everywhere
dancing is either law
or crime. i have no particular
taste for this world. i am looking
for an utterly still completely
dead hotel.

about photography

I hate photographs,
those square paper Judases of the world,
the fakers of love’s image of all things.
They show you parents where the frogs of doom
are standing under the heavenly flour,
they picture grassy slopes
where the bugs of accident whirr twisted
in the flaws of the world.
It is weird,
this violence of particulars
against the unity of being.

Japanese Girl with Red Table
--Stephen Dobyns

The Japanese girl thinks she will die today.
In her mirror, she sees she is already dying
and she tries to compose her face into how
it will appear in death: forgiving, forgetful.
Between her white breasts, she already sees
the red mark of the knife—red as the red table
on the floor behind her, red as the red border
of the purple robe falling open around her
as she kneels before the mirror. Yes, she thinks,
she will destroy herself today; and her lover,
who has not come, will hear of it from people
crying to each other as he passes on the street
with his destination a solid object in his mind,
as real as the red table or the black and white
vase upon the table. He will hear that a girl
has been found with a knife in her breast,
but he won’t believe it’s she as he continues
toward the red table in his mind. Then at last
some friend will bring him the news, tell him
while he sits with his wife in the early evening,
eating sweets and drinking tea as he describes
the small business of his day. He will be holding
a porcelain cup with a picture of a single gull,
and he will listen to how a girl has been found
lying naked in her own blood on the golden rug
he gave her, while within him the words will be
eating his body as fire eats paper, as he tries
hopelessly to hold his cup steady and make no face.

I gave up on my sculpturing 'cause my life had gone all sad, an I went to work down at the factory, it weren't art but it weren't bad

Ben Franklin, Labor Day Gun Show and Flea Market, Hillsville, VA


Another song that provided company last winter: Hoyt Axton's "Snowblind Friend"

God ain't jive, for I can see his love as it runs alive one by one through fields of rusted wire

Have You Seen Me?, Big Walker Mountain, Virginia

I spent most of last winter holed up in a small trailer in Grayson County, drinking grean-tea or Virginia Gentleman and listening to Hoyt Axton and Mott the Hoople records I bought at an antique store in Mouth of Wilson. Here's one of the songs I listened to repeatedly.

tried to fight the creeping sense of dread with temporal things, most of the time I guess I felt alright

Brooklyn, New York

--a couple songs from the mountain goats' all hail west texas.

jeff davis county blues.

after three nights in jail, i head north from toyahvale,
switch to 285 in pecos, head up to red bluff.
my walk's real steady and my eyes are real cold
but i feel like i'm all of sixteen years old --
lost in the travel lodge, with the television on and the sound down,
i don't feel so tough.
old issues of sunset magazine to read,
sleep for twelve hours, and dream about home.

i have no place to go, so i drive up to new mexico.
fix my eyes in the rearview when i cross the state line.
and i panic, i guess. and although it's quite late,
i take the first exit to 128.
i am coming back to midlind.
i hope you won't mind.
polaroids of the two of us scattered on the passenger's seat.
i drive slowly
and evenly
and i dream about home.

distant stations.

i found an old rock in the dry dirt outside
the door of my motel room.
it was a triangle with soft rounded edges
and a split down the middle of one corner.
it was darker than english moss.
green like the soft frills of a peacock's plume.
i waited for you, but i never told you where i was.
it was you who taught me how to write these kinds of equations.
i waited on the steps for you,
and i hid in the bushes whenever a car pulled into the parking lot.
you taught me how to listen to these distant stations.
distant stations.

i saw the sky break.
i threw a rock at a crow who was playing in the mulch of some rose bushes by the motel office.
missed him by a good yard or two.
i sang old songs from nowhere.
los angeles.
albuquerque.
i said a small prayer for the poor and the naked and the hungry.
and i prayed real hard for you.
i waited for you, but i never told you where i was.
it was you who taught me how to write this kind of equation.
i waited on the steps for you,
and i hid in the bushes whenever a car pulled into the parking lot.
you taught me how to listen to these distant stations.
distant stations.

Cross over shame like a wise dove, who cares not for fame just for shy love

Doves, Brooklyn, NY

Life on the Prairie
--Mark Conway

Why do we stay here, sleeping on a dwarf
dream, the subtitles shaky, waking to fish
for loose change? I’d like to go inside nowwhere it’s warm and you never know
what’s next. Under the Big Top
of my mobile home, a survival kit’s included. It’s a real time-saver, what’s more,
it works — I’m spared the spectacle
of the chapped, you know, the portable sky. Inside we have our own dome, sugar
doughnuts, and the outline of an escape.
I don’t find that comforting. But it beats

sleeping on the knife. The meadowlark has
just one song. Clearly, we hear what we’ve
missed. I live here anyway, in a landscape
shaped like it’s impossible to end.


The Founding of Friendship, Texas
--David Daniel

The burial of Anna, age six months,
First dead in the new land,
Was a cause for celebration.
Not only had her soul—they saw it!—
Risen with a flock of scissortails
To join Mary's virgin train above,
But they knew, being gamblers also
On the fleshy souls of cotton and maize,
That she did not, in fact, rise
But burrowed into the black soil
To mingle with eternity here.
After a year of traveling, the family
Could finally stop, for the love of Anna
And the promise of the land
She had become, land that rose so slightly
At the San Gabriel River,
Where the only trees in sight
Shimmer a string of emeralds
On the dusty breast of Friendship, Texas.

Fools of Time
--David Daniel

At seventeen Mary placed her satin dress beside us on the table,
Then she smiled at me and we did the best that we were able.
Back on the dance floor, she seemd to hang in the air like an angel

We were fools for love, making a fool out of time.

Soon I left town because I fell in love with leaving,
And Mary married some boy she thought that she could believe in.
back on the dance floor would could know what we were seeking:

We were fools for love, now we’re just the fools of time.

Last year Mary jumped from a hotel outside of Nashville.
With her dress blown out she must have seemed like an angel of disaster—
Maybe now she knows the things that we were after.

We were fools for love, now we’re the fools of time.

If anyone should ask me if I be a rambling boy, the sporting life I know I have enjoyed

Williamsburg Bridge, Brooklyn, NY

Bert Jansch's LA Turnaround (re-issued by Drag City in June) has been an almost nightly summer listen. "Travelling Man" is the 2nd song on that album. In this vid, the music starts around 1:20.

There's no plan we can fall back on, the road this far can't be retraced, there's no punchline anybody can tack on, there are loose ends by the score

Horses, Cana, VA

Only the Crossing Counts
--CD Wright

It's not how we leave one's life. How go off
the air. You never know do you. You think you're ready
for anything; then it happens, and you're not. You're really
not. The genesis of an ending, nothing
but a feeling, a slow movement, the dusting
of furniture with a remnant of the revenant's shirt.
Seeing the candles sink in their sockets; we turn
away, yet the music never quits. The fire kisses our face.
O phthsis, o lotharian dead eye, no longer
will you gaze on the baize of the billiard table. No more
shooting butter dishes out of the sky. Scattering light.
Between snatches of poetry and penitence you left
the brumal wood of men and women. Snow drove
the butterflies home. You must know
how it goes, known all along what to expect,
sooner or later … the faded cadence of anonymity.
Frankly, my dear, frankly, my dear, frankly

Death
--Bill Knott

Going to sleep, I cross my hands on my chest.
They will place my hands like this.
It will look as though I am flying into myself.