flowers

so today i wake up fresh, go for an interview at whole foods, and decide to spend my last afternoon of unemployment between grolier and harvard bookshops in cambridge. the sun is shining. i go into grolier and say hi to the clerk who wears a bowtie. i ask if they have the new kevin goodan. they are sold out. melvin dixon? they don't have it. i start wandering among the shelves--there's louise glück, e.e. cummings, and d.h. lawrence on the table, mark levine, jorie graham, etc.  i pick up 'transcendental studies' by keith waldrop which just won the national book award when a teenage boy opens the shop door: do you have any feminist or queer poetry, he wants to know? be still my fucking heart: a teenage boy asking for feminist or queer poetry. perhaps we should save the earth. the clerk, dan, walks over to a shelf and says he thinks they only have an anthology. 'an anthology?' he says. 'it's a gift so i don wanna give an anthology.' i propose audre lorde. dan the clerk says they don't have it. he gives the kid ana montes, which the kid considers and then leaves. i get high on keith waldrop and go outside to come down in the sun. 

outside i start wondering: how is it possible that a bookstore that sells only poetry-- a landmark of avant-garde literature since 1925 and a juicy intellectual cactus in the conservative desert of boston-- carries only anthologies of feminist and queer poetry? how can they not have dixon or lorde? and why do white women always write about flowers? what's with them and gardens? why do i find this so irritating? am i sexist? in the words of helen dewitt, what's going on??

i chill out and go into the harvard bookstore, stumble across 'the historiographic perversion' by marc nichanian and read gil anidjar's afterword. i shake off the violence of the archive walking into central square and play a guitar at the guitar shop. there a man asks me what kind of music i want to play and starts talking about learning banjo in his younger days. he is still talking when my phone rings and i say, 'excuse me i have to take this i think i am getting a job.' the woman at whole foods tells me she is not giving me a job. i hang up the phone and the man resumes talking banjo while i realize to the hurt background of my own discordant strumming that this is not my last afternoon of unemployment. i will never be able to buy this guitar. i will never be able to buy anything. fuck this country. i'm going to binge on poetry. 

rodneys bookstore is just 2 blocks down, far inferior to grolier and harvard but mainstream enough to carry audre lorde. i ask the clerk. no audre lorde? ok. how about june jordan? no? probly no melvin dixon then either, huh? righto. well. there are lots of good poets. look, here's louise glück...writing about irises. and here's h.d.! ...writing about roses.

now i like 'nature' much as the next person. trees, sun, air: food. it's not hard to convince me that we are uglier than trees. but if you contend with nature from the vantage of your flowerbed; if you identify in your menopausal years with the wilting magnolia; if you speak of lovers and roses; i will hate on you. and ima hate extra hard when it's your reclusive middle-class clichés on the shelf instead of poems with a taste for the noisy, the hairy, and the unemployed. poems for the aminals like us.

on that note i leave you with a good & decidedly transcendental poem with a reference to flowers by a white person. (whats good keith waldrop.)

8. 

Need not end. Indeed, nothing. Step

out. Grist for wits. Shadow of your

shell. Stand there.

No other ground. No

other. And the world concerns you every-

where, but do not identify with it.

Let light onto us. Flowers through the

gate, flowers skimming

the wall. A carpet of petal.

Treasures below the earth. Neither in

this world nor another, guarding.

Nothing but fade and flourish.