Dan Disney reviews the deciBels series, including _Memory Cards: Dogen Series_

See here for the omnibus review.

A Review Including _Memory Cards: Dogen Series_ (Vagabond Press, 2014)

Ali Alizadeh reviews the decibels series from the amazing Vagabond Press. During the skype launch, I said that as the editor of Tinfish Press, I envy Vagabond. I meant that in a good way; they're doing amazing trans-Pacific work. This is just part of their catalogue. See their website here: http://vagabondpress.net/

The Decibels series was curated by Pam Brown.

And the review, here:

https://overland.org.au/2015/01/art-difference-and-pluralism/

A new book(let)

New, in the deciBels series from Vagabond Press in Sydney. Vagabond is an amazing trans-Pacific press. Have a look-see.

I first posted the poems in the booklet on this blog, though I prefer them inside the square brown covers. Some of the poems are also forthcoming in Interim, Golden Handcuffs Review, and elsewhere. Others already appeared in Marsh Hawk Review.

mem card: "No Shit" : 4 july

The moon is neither new nor old, because moon inherits moon. I'm usually a happy, satisfied person, but not today. I can sometimes spend time alone, but usually I hit the button that shocks me instead. I'm a sad American, caught in black & white. The wall behind me reads No Shit. History's bunk, so I have none that cannot fit beneath my bed. I sort my memories as a teenage girl does beads, dividing blues from yellows, greens. They fight me back, like balls in a lottery machine, dancing. After practice, she sings in the car, stabs the air with her index. Been around the world, don't speak the language / But your booty don't need explainin'.

                                                                     --4 July 2014

Notes:

Photograph by Jim Goldberg

"The moon": Dogen

"booty": Jason Derulo, "Talk Dirty"

 

mem card: "thusness": 20 june

Water is only the true thusness of water. It's more than flowing, but flowing is more than itself. Why are all abstract paintings alike, he asks. My daughter needed to take the portrait of a stranger. When I download her photos, I see a college student seated at a bench, eyes at her level. Do not take pictures of the homeless. Better to witness their tents, their blankets, their coffee cups, their dogs. The Stranger is newly translated. How do you navigate “maman”? The same sun in French is not a son. The same sound is not sound, but the thusness of sound. Read this sonnet like a lawyer in love; the speaker makes an argument, after all. They used to rhyme, love and prove. Now we prove our love without sound's symmetries. Under that tree, or that one, I thee wed. You in your loaner ring, and I in mine.

 

                                                                     --20 June 2014

Note:

"Water is only": Dogen

mem card: "zombie apocalypse": 20 june

The original face has no birth and death. My son refuses to enter the pool, turns his back on two young parents and a child splashing. That's not it, he says when I suggest. That's not it, not it. I will not guess, assume. He's my multiple choice generator, lacking empty circles. My mother stared at another woman in a restaurant. It was a moment of intimacy I wish I hadn't witnessed, he writes. To perceive is not to know. It's some kind of zombie apocalypse, this wanting to read minds, or at least faces, to lever into synapses, catch impulses before they stick. When asked what he'd do in case, my husband responded that he'd cook them. Our daughter's only possession when we met her was a thick brown pencil. She clutched it in her fist. We don't remember her early sounds; she started on us with words.

                                                                    --20 June 2014

Note:

 "The original face": Dogen: "My late master, old buddha, said:"

mem card: "no half-water": 17 June

There is no original water. There is no half-water or full, adopted or step-water. Why water sticks to rock. Why rock sits still, amid its burgeoning. She posts a photograph of her mother's hands, folded over her lap. A wheelchair. I know you're important to me, but I can't recall your name. How we gravitate to the predicate, its tragic forgetting. But the subject of the sentence is knowing. I know that, my daughter says. Her shoulder blades are butterfly wings; they fold. The side that folds loses. Put a coin in the slot; it becomes a verb. The predicate is all adrenaline.

                                                                        --17 June 2014

Note:
"no original": Dogen

mem card: "the dammed river": 15 June

The path of water is not noticed by water, but is realized by water. The dammed river knows itself, unrealized. The first time I saw the Mekong, son in arms. She sits with her daughter on the plot where her husband wasn't buried, wondering how it would feel to him. Something about time in the poem, one woman noted; it's not there, except for “April or May.” Suspickit, my daughter said. At the cash register I turned to look at my son in the stroller. Saw instead my father, white-haired, his liquid eyes. His cleft re-sewn at 20. Mine stitched at one. We don't think to stitch the mountain's clefts; waterfalls do that when it rains.

                                      --Father's Day, 15 June 2014

Note:

"The path": Dogen

Frederick W. Schultz, 12/1/1913-11/4/1992

mem card: "Ku`i": 12 june

A small twig is the everywhere of old twigs. The former athlete lives in section 8. He's 36. He can't walk except with hands held to the wall, suffers lack of muscle memory, spasms. Can't hold his trumpet, or his kids. Drinks whiskey & pepto-bismol. Eidetic means “what we see,” John says. What is visible is marked. Think of what inhabits your losses now: count them like beads, call them out. A neurologist sighed. The man who walks Ku`i the tortoise on Lulani Dr. directs him with lettuce, flower petals. Ku`i means to stitch or to pound, to churn, to seam, to boom, to crush, to clash. To care is to manage, to assist living. To cut the sentence whole cloth. Use a straight edge & a knife, my husband says.

                                                          --12 June 2014

Note: 

"a small twig": Dogen

mem card: "words will never": 11 june

A painting of a rice cake does not satisfy hunger. Nor a painting of the mountain the desire to see from its summit. The ocean view is a cheat, he says, you can see the telephoto effect. My son remembers his past by way of what he ate. In the mirror I saw his cheeks full, fists clenched. My memory of that meal does not satisfy his hunger, or mine. We remember best what we write in our own hand. How do blind people know where the bumps are? he asks. Words are mountains. We hike up Diamond Head, then eat malasadas. Increasingly, spikes are put on sidewalks, so the homeless cannot sleep there. But words will never hurt me.

                                                                 --June 11, 2014

"A painting": Dogen

Memory Card [nerves, nations]

Although mountains belong to the nation, mountains belong to people who love them. Mountains lean like mothers; at night they're what isn't lit, can't be felt save as assumption based on fact. If memory writes fact, we are tattooed skin, nerve, synapse. We know the mountain exists because our brain has been altered by it. Cajal's mountains and waterfalls, gravity's nerves shuttling in rock pools. To assume means to think you know, gain power from that knowing. We assume what memory offers, until it stutters, runner caught between first and second, wagering his vacillations against another runner's sprint. There's no clock in baseball, but it's still all time. The mountain has its rain delays, days we time the water's flowing stops to arrive at clarity. Shama thrushes & Miles Davis: sun and spotify. It's “nation” that sets boundaries, as a mountain does. What is the mountain's quantum of river blood, its signature on the rolls? Where is the place of my hand, index lanced, red dot bubbling?

                                                                    --1 June 2014

Images by Santiago Ramón y Cajal, whose Recollections of My Life comes highly recommended.
First line by Zen Master Dogen, from Moon in  Dewdrop