When I strolling
Among the ruins of my love
Of her with the long, straight blonde hair,
I paused to dig.
I became an archaeologist.

It did not take long before I uncovered
Broken pieces and scraps.
I hosed away the sand and dirt,
Put each piece
Into one of the glass cases
Within the museum of my brain.

One night after much wine, I visited the museum,
Picked up a small item.
It was so cracked and shattered
I had difficulty in recognizing what it was.
I finally recognized it as one of her kisses.

I looked at the kiss and asked,
"Has time distorted you so much
That it takes long study to recognize."
"No," the kiss said, "Today, I am
Exactly as I was when I was born
From the meeting of your two lips."

PHILOSOPHICAL VISITATION     22

I gave her,
Her with the long, straight blonde hair
Gifts,

A Petersen's bird guide,
A Peterson CD of bird songs.

I inscribed the gifts with the inscription:
"Goodbye forever."

After my breaking away from the magnet that was her body,
I had a tranquil mind.
Epicurus and Lucretius
Would have been proud of my achievement.

With my tranquil mind,
I sat in my garden and contemplated:
A tranquil mind wears rags
And begs.
Begs for
Emotions' tempests
And the damages
That comes from living by the illusion
That you are loved by someone,
Believing lies is really our greatest happiness.

So I poured myself another glass of wine,
Drinking glass after glass of wine
Is the only way to cope
With a tranquil mind.

PHILOSOPHICAL VISITATION     23

In the dark I sat on a white bench.
The bench was covered with finger-shaped moonlight splashes
As if a moon goddess had sent her slender hand
Down to the earth.
I was sitting under a hummingbird feeder
That a hummingbird had never visited.
Every day for four months
I had spent hours watching the feeder,
But no hummingbird ever arrived.
A thick dark cloud covered the moon
And the slender hand disappeared.
I looked up at an empty dark sky,
A vast, black, blank slate, not one star.

After she, her with the long, straight blonde hair,
Had left,
I had been drinking glass after glass of wine.
I gazed at my empty glass.
I gazed at the empty bottle.
All of sudden, I wished
That I could stop loving women
I wished I could stop loving this woman
With the long, straight blonde hair.

Now, she had been gone for two hours.
While sitting here with me on this white bench,
She said that he had never loved a man.
She never loved her ex, her lustful husband.
She had never loved any man.

Then she went into a rapturous discourse
On how she had the greatest love that could be had.
God loved her.
She said that God had spoken to her,
That God had told her that God loved her.
God had called her by name,
And said that he loved her.
She could only love God,
She could never love anyone but God.

She was transformed. She looked
More radiant than I had ever seen her.

She was so dazzlingly beautiful
That I wanted to touch her,
Put my hand on her long, straight blonde hair,
Put my hand on her thigh,
Put my hand on some place on her body..
I sensed it was impossible.

I became very sad.
I thought,
I, although an octogenarian, but a poet, a painter,
A photographer, a Ph. D., a model, I
Could compete with a man sixty-years younger,
But I could not compete
With a lie, a fantasy.

PHILOSOPHICAL VISITATION     24

 Wine, red wine, was poured slowly,
Drop by drop
From a dark gold goblet
Etched
With thin lines of light-gold butterflies
On her quivering skin naked
Between the pulled-opened white silk kimono,
The wine was drunk
By licking her flesh.

The movie plot was for simple minds,
Really stupid.
I should have spent my time reading the Tao.

I saw the red wine shining on her breast,
On her belly.
A glittering drop was atop the tip of her nipple.
The gold reflections
From the goblet
Formed a circle that fluttered around her navel.

It was a stupid movie.

I watched the movie four times.

PHILOSOPHICAL VISITATION     25

As I left the marsh
The song of a yellow-breasted flycatcher
Went with me,
The sound held my hand,
Swayed, rubbed against me,
Kissed me.

It was yesterday
When with her with the long, straight blonde hair,
When after eating together
At a five-star ranked Chinese restaurant,
We departed from each other.
I went away alone,
Completely alone.

PHILOSOPHICAL VISITATION     26

I took my Campari to the lake,
I gazed at the colors of the grasses,
Varied greens, varied golds.

I gaze through my Campari glass
At the water in front of the reeds.
I saw rosy lips.
I actually felt the kisses
Of these lips of water.
They felt like the kisses of ardent flesh,
The lips were open and quivered.

I remembered kissing her,
Her with the long, straight blonde hair.
It was one of those meaningless,
Tepid, polite good-night kisses.
I see again those desired pale pink lips,
But when I kissed her,
I felt nothing, nothing, nothing.

PHILOSOPHICAL VISITATION     27

Sitting among yellow flowers and grasses
On the edge of the marsh,
I watch
The white undersides of a marsh hawk.

When the hawk flew away,
The whiteness stayed still and suspended in air.


The whiteness came out of the sky
To walk among yellow flowers on grasses.
The whiteness sat on the grasses near us,
I and the women with the long, straight blonde hair.

The whiteness had beautiful naked knees.
The knees of the woman
With the long, straight blonde hair were covered.

According to the measurement of mankind
The woman with the long, straight blonde hair
Was nearer to me than the whiteness,
But according to my emotions, the knees
Of the whiteness were closer.

The woman with the long, straight blonde hair
Was talking about how much she loved God,
And God had told her he loved her.

While she talked,
I imagined I was kissing the naked knees of the whiteness.

PHILOSOPHICAL VISITATION     28

Since I was moving away, going
To the promised land, I decided.
It was a desperate decision
Because I was deeply in love with this woman
Who had long, straight blonde hair.
I decided to phase her out of my life
Because I felt due to her unhappy past
And her present beliefs that she
Could never love me, or love anyone.  Something
Had happened to destroy her capacity
For love of a human being.
Something had tamed and ordered her natural energy.
I wished she was more like Inanna,
Who when she save the Huluppu Tree
From destruction and saw the Huluppus Tree
Became filled with evil,
The serpent that could not be charmed,
The dark maid Lilith,
Inanna did not abandoned the Huluppu Tree,
Although she wept for what had happened to the tree.
Inanna cared for the tree with her hand.
She settled the earth around the tree with her foot.
The woman with the long, straight blonde hair,
Was not Inanna, for when she
With the long, straight blonde hair found that love
In this world was inhabited by evil,
She abandoned love in this world.
Not like Inanna she did not care for the tree
Until a man came along
To rid the tree of evil.
A tree is love.
I thought I was this man
Who could rid the tree of evil,
And let deep and true love flourish on the earth once again.

But I sensed in my relationship with her,
She did not think I was this warrior.

I knew love with her was hopeless,
For she was incapable of love
So I decided to phase out of my life.

I would not say a word,
Just go away, vanish.
With her out of my life,
I would no longer
Be depressed by despair
That is the result of hope and desire.

But,
But,
When I was getting ready to disappear,
She came to me
As I was sitting on a table.
When I saw her long, straight blonde hair,
I was incapable
Of being honest
And saying "Goodbye forever."
I just looked at her,
Did not say a word.

She seemed to sense
My resolution to end
My suffering as a rejected
And unrequited lover.
She grasped my hand,
Repeated several times,
"Please do not dump me.
Please do not dump me.
Please do not dump me."

I was deeply moved.
I believed she really cared about me,
That she could love me
As much as I loved her.

We resumed our relationship.
Now again I suffer
From the despair that hope and desire can bring.
I had to face the fact
That she is incapable of loving any human being.
She is autistic.

But I suppose this is the best of all possible worlds,
For  I have found a new joy, wine.
I now have increased my drinking of wine.
The more wine I drink the more joyous I feel
Drinking wine
Helps me forget what is real.
Helps me forget she cannot love me.
Her autism
Has resulted in my hilarity tonight.
I just finished a bottle
Of Beaujolais Nouveau, 2005.
2005, a horrible year for me
Was a good year for French wines.
I now with a corkscrew
Am opening another bottle.

PHILOSOPHICAL VISITATION     29

Archaeologists, we all are Archaeologists, although
Not
Cuneiformists
Deciphering marks on stone
To approach with surmises third millennium BC Sumer.

We are
Archeologists digging beneath our words to find a lost present
In the ruins of our quotidian momentaneousness.

Among ruins, a Chinese restaurant, the décor, the prop, stage setting--
All our present actual moments
Are ruins
Covering
A buried, never-to-be-known reality--
I saw in gold and green a dragon whose green-outlined gold scales
Twisted
My sake to turn into a paradox and irony.

There are no known facts, only interpretations.  How can I interpret
The sinking
And rising
Of  her two cheek dimples as they become commas
And punctuate her sentences.

I know my present illusions will be shattered in retrospect.  But
My quixotic self will caress an erotic beyond its grasp.
It is like imagining wavy marks found on a slate foundation
Indicate a prehistoric lake.
I cannot control and make these lost waters shiftless.

I have not Cartesian or Enlightment understanding.  Nor Do I have
The understanding of
Gnosticism, Kabbalism, Rosicrucianism, neo-Platonism or
New Ageism.
I vaguely sense the intricacies, inaccuracies, impediments,
Impossibilities
That emanate from her
Long, straight blonde hair.

This pot of hot water holding a white vase of sake is both
A scroll
And a labyrinth.
We face with miscellaneous facial gestures each other,
And mistranslate each other's mysteries.
I recall Paul Celan saying to Edmond Jabés
That he could not translate
His writings because their silences were too different.
My silence and her silence are too different.

We speak, but as soon as the words are spoken,
They migrate, fly in front of a full moon to cemeteries and oblivion.

Everything I long for elicits laughter
From this broken shadow of an intact finger
Across the filigreed holder around a napkin
By a gold rimmed saucer on the tablecloth
And its filibuster of silence.

PHILOSOPHICAL VISITATION     30

I gaze at blue
Invading silver,
Or silver
Invading blue
In the bottom
Of an empty mussel shell
Piled among empty mussel shells
Until both blue
And silver lose
The senses of their existences
As they wait
In a pearl-tinted porcelain bowl
To be tossed into oblivion.

We bring to this Chinese restaurant the clarity
Of old clauses and their cloisters, the learned man's
Mine of information and its obstacles, the ill education
Of street-corner savants and their debarkation
To death in life, the formalist's fictions and their narcotics

To confront the unperceived, the unrevealed, the undiscovered
In each other.

Can we uneducated ourselves to penetrate beyond
Past knowledge and find in each other
And in our selves our tellurian unique existences.

Can be unangelic long enough to have other than apparent
Bodies and use our intelligences
To overcome what we have learned and has disgraced us.

Can we subdue the surfacing of concealed screams,
Cover with lava laws and lave away with erasures
That leave smears of the incommensurable and rapture.

Above her on boards painted to simulate brocade,
Above her long, straight blonde hair
That my finger want to walk across air and touch
Is a golden Chinese mask
With black calligraphy inscribed
On the exaggerated cardboard uplift of the golden cheeks.
Reflection that spin from golden mask fall
To spot with gold her white gold hair with yellow gold.
I try to read the black calligraphy,
But I fail since I cannot read Mandarin Chinese.

The black calligraphy began to speak:
She is tired of decoys, dedications, and death watches,
She is tired of  uneaten forbidden fruits and obedience,
She is tired of dictionaries revised by dictators,
She is tired of domesticated Don Juans and their crosses and dogmas.
She is tired of the failure of fan mail.

Syllables in my brain form,
The syllables have blank spaces, churches,
Multiplication tables, conspirators, dead languages
In between and do not connect to form words.
These incomplete sounds bore through my skull
To go forth from my brain, a material thing
Like a Lucretian eye beam
To kiss the skin above her eye lashes on her forehead,
But ricochet, return to my brain
Without ever having their existences known.
I, like Jules LaForgue tongue-tied harlequin
Cannot not act and perform the primier pas.

I wonder from what grave in the cemetery of my brain
Will a corpse arise to construct from the dead past
My illusions of her who is now
Eating a mussel across the table.
Can I overcome what has been
Although I do not know what it was.

When this corpse interprets and invents
My present reality through a radical revision
Of what is being felt and being perceived
Does the corpse use a chisel, or an impulse.
Even what is lasting in the selection from uncertainty
Is a transitory and effervescent speck
From an unknowable that becomes a representation.

I gaze again at her chin shadowed skin,
Another mystery begins, polemically sacrosanct,
Or it is the mere causation of my situation
Of being born into a particular historical era and location.

Three tiny wrinkles flow like three tiny rivers
On her freckled skin to disappear
Where the cleavage of her breasts begin.
As I stare at this landscape that becomes a narrative
Of this corpse within my brain, I am disconcerted
By a digression as I sense the impenetrability
Of her that I watch.  I can never really know
The indeterminateness of her inner responses
That she will subdue with the fictions of her language.

I wonder if this unknowable corpse in my brain
That is constructing her in my incandescent,
Vexed consciousness dreams like Pygmalion
That after he has sculptured an approximation
Will she become real, move her leg towards my leg.
Or is my eroticism only quixotic and a fiction.

As I was engaged in my solitary cogitations,
She spoke:

"I hear you have been looking for
A non-dualistic approach to subjectivity."

I replied:
"I have been trying to create a language
With an Otherness."

"Are you trying to create a language
That exceeds the limits of the individual consciousness,
Or somewhat opposite,
A language that automatically
Comes into existence from an emanation
From words engendered
From an origin that comes
From the radical singularity
Of the concrete particular,
Spatio-temporal unique perception
That can never have an identity outside itself."

"I would say, more the latter."

The waitress interrupted and stilled
Our ongoing conversation
By bringing two kettles
With hot water surrounding
White vases of sake.

We drunk sake in silence,
And then she spoke,

"I never loved a man,
I never loved my husband.
I married on account of disk jockeys,
Decimals, drive-in movies, decals,
Dow-Jones industrials doggerel, dogma,
Daydreams, dance halls, democracy--
Not love.
Living with my husband
Aborted any birth of love.
I acquiesced to the rules and regulations
Of marriage and love in me was murdered.
Now I cannot love anyone.

You see, I was like the frog
That was put in a pot of water
On a stove and the heat turned on.
Instead of jumping out of the pot,
The frog stayed in,
For the frog had the type of skin
That could adjust
To the rising temperature of the water.
I adjusted
And adjusted
Until I was boiled to death."

Then there was complete silence.

I looked up at the golden mask above her
And then down toawards her.
She had disappeared.
There was only empty space.
I reached towards her,
Found only unoccupied air.


The waitress came to my table, said
"A woman called.
She said you would know who it was,
For she was the woman
With long, straight blonde hair.
She said she supposed to meet you here,
But something went wrong,
She could not
Open her coffin,
She could not
Dig her way
Out of her grave.