dream that I have a new job which entails singing one note while riding by people on a motorcycle. They pay me to try to match my pitch as I pass. I tell M. I'm going to make a lot of money this way and ask if he wants to join the company. He tells me I am being unrealistic, that nobody is going to pay me for this. I tell him he really will regret not joining, but he digs in his heels. Sure enough, I start raking in the dough as he watches me ride by singing my one perfect pure note.

Archaic Torso of Apollo

We never knew his fantastic head,
where eyes like apples ripened. Yet
his torso, like a lamp, still glows
with his gaze which, although turned down low,

lingers and shines. Else the prow of his breast
couldn't dazzle you, nor in the slight twist
of his loins could a smile run free
through that center which held fertility.

Else this stone would stand defaced and squat
under the shoulders' diaphanous dive
and not glisten like a predator's coat;

and not from every edge explode
like starlight: for there's not one spot
that doesn't see you. You must change your life.

R.M. Rilke

Go see shortbus. It is a sloppy, brave, imperfect, original, ugly and beautiful revelation. The truest thing I've seen in awhile...even made me temporarily less ashamed to be american.

655,000

tiny jim and the dream of being thin

okay, well, because someone did so in Japan, I tried googling caitlin poetry, and this is what I came up with.

bought this red velvet dress on the street yesterday that used to belong to a 90 year old neighbor who died.

ideology vs. philosophy

In his profile of Bill Clinton (the 9/11 new yorker) David Remnick asks him what he thinks about his successor. BC says he worries less about GW's intellect than his ideology: "...But the thing that bothers me about having an ideology as opposed to a philosophy is that, if you have an ideology, then the outcome is dictated before the facts are in, before the arguments are heard. And that, I think, can cause problems.”

I was thinking about that in light of the politics around poetry, such as they are. Perhaps the disparate and mostly artificial ideologies are what keep us from being surprised, seeing beauty...perhaps we're dictating the outcome of a poem before the facts are in.