Rick Bursky Poem

THE SEAPORT DINER, PORT JEFFERSON STATION

My mother and a cousin decide to go to The Seaport Diner,
my father's favorite, for a cup of coffee on New Year's Eve.
Though he's been dead for six years, they take him along.
The black marble box that holds his ashes is placed
in a shopping bag, then on their table next to a window.
On another night the waitress might have asked about the box.
But tonight the diner is crowded, she doesn't notice
that two women asked for three cups of coffee.
There are many ways to suck the marrow out of times bones.
This is my mother's. No one's seen the inside of the box,
though at times I've thought all of heaven was within.
By refusing to bury it my mother is unwittingly hiding
my father from the devil. At a small table in the center of the box,
my father sits. Ashes piled to his knees, he remembers
flames and fears he's in hell. If he walked forever
he would discover the wall and on the other side of the wall
my mother's hand holding the spoon she stirred coffee with.

-Rick Bursky The Soup of Something Missing

Kenneth Rexroth

I think one of the symptoms of being civilized is that you never know when you are being courageous.

-Kenneth Rexroth

Nightmare

In a dream a friend was standing with me on a sidewalk in New York City. She was offering me a subway token as we approached the below-ground entrance. "I have two," she said. I begged off, feeling too ashamed to take one. The next moment we were in a car on the highway. My friend was driving. We came to a complete stop at a traffic jam. Suddenly the car was moving freely again - because we were going in reverse at high speed! I winced, imagining we'd be crushed at any moment by an oncoming vehicle. My friend was looking at me and cackling, not even glancing in the rear-view mirror. I didn't want us to die. What to do? Pull the keys? Take the wheel? I opened my eyes.

Black Stockings

My recent painting Black Stockings just got accepted into the upcoming Pawtucket Arts Collaborative juried show. The opening reception is March 4th 5:30-7:00 PM at the Blackstone Valley Visitors Center in downtown Pawtucket.

View the painting here.
Here's the statement that accompanies the painting:

About Painting

I think of painting as a strange, visceral, intuitive, painful game of chess. Here is how the chess game goes: I begin with a sienna sketch, treating my canvas like a chalkboard, sketching and wiping away until I get an image that I feel is strong enough to develop. Then I add color and confirm the elements. Certain themes recur in batches; a character, a color scheme, or a certain shape, whatever my subconscious is generating. Other elements are complete surprises. I have to sink in and listen to what the characters and objects want to say inside these theatrical dreamscapes, as if I were a novelist. The painting and I will wrestle and argue and sometimes reach a standoff. Then the painting sits facing the wall for weeks or months or years.

About Black Stockings

This painting was started a while back. It needed something off in the distance. The land mass I had originally painted wasn't working. When the Arts Collaborative proposed the theme of water, the painting came back to life. I changed the land mass to a sea of turquoise water. Then the painting gave me an actress who wanted to star in this play, and the character brought the setting to life. I felt lucky that the elements came together.

I’m not sure what the woman with the black stockings is up to, or where, exactly, she is. I imagined that she was at a hotel, or a villa, and that maybe she was a mistress. But I don’t know. I only pose questions and scenarios, and invite the viewer to respond. The viewer's perception completes the chess match.

Paul Durcan

It is promulgated by the arbiters of culture that an artist should have only one spouse. An artist such as myself wth the two spouses of poetry and picture-making is not looked upon favourably by the chaperones of art.

Let us be chivalrous to the chaperones but let us never compromise with their punitive monomania. Art is not a prison with poetry in one cell, picture-making in another cell and so on. "Spare me the ghostly procession of your conceptual categories" wrote Nicolas Berdyaev.

-Paul Durcan Crazy About Women

Arthur Miller

INTERVIEWER
Do you have a routine for writing?

MILLER
I wish I had a routine for writing. I get up in the morning and I go out to my studio and I write. And then I tear it up! That's the routine, really. Then, occasionally, something sticks. And then I follow that. The only image I can think of is a man walking around with an iron rod in his hand during a lightning storm.

Paul Auster

Writing is physical for me. I always have the sense that the words are coming out of my body, not just my mind. I write in longhand, and the pen is scratching the words onto the page. I can even hear the words being written. So much of the effort that goes into writing prose for me is about making sentences that capture the music that I'm hearing in my head. It takes a lot of work, writing, writing, and rewriting to get the music exactly the way you want it to be. That music is a physical force. Not only do you write books physically, but you read books physically as well. There’s something about the rhythms of language that correspond to the rhythms of our own bodies. An attentive reader is finding meanings in the book that can't be articulated, finding them in his or her body.
-Paul Auster

You can't put your feet on the ground until you've touched the sky.
-Paul Auster

You see, the interesting thing about books, as opposed, say, to films, is that it's always just one person encountering the book... it's one to one.
-Paul Auster

Kurt Vonnegut

Find a subject you care about and which you feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.
-Kurt Vonnegut

Writers can treat their mental illnesses every day.
-Kurt Vonnegut

The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.
-Kurt Vonnegut

We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.
-Kurt Vonnegut

Camouflage

I was walking with Lily today and on the way home I took the path through the woods. I was warmed up but I had to take off my gloves, sunglasses, and hat to remove my turtleneck scarf. When I went to put my sunglasses back on I realized they were no longer in my hand, so I turned around and started to retrace my steps. Everywhere I looked were sienna colored oak leaves and dark twigs. My sunglasses completely blended in! I thought about those puzzles where you try to find a creature that is camouflaged in an environment. I've had these sunglasses for 22 years. They have a nice shape, and I like to wear them in winter because the lenses are not too dark.

I scanned the ground imagining all the positions the sunglasses could have landed in, but all I saw were leaves and twigs. I walked up and down the path a few times, and then there they were, folded, with their lenses facing down. I picked them up, put them on, and smiled .When Lily and I got to the fenced-in baseball field I let her run. Lily was wild over all the spring smells, looking for stuff to scavenge. She found a bright blue plastic freeze-pop wrapper and was licking it. Then she ran with it hanging from her mouth. I called her but she ignored me, and each time I approached her she playfully ran away. Then she stopped and gobbled it up in two bites! That will become some interesting camouflage.

Masquerade

Yesterday when I walked Lily down poop alley a lady I see occasionally was slowly waddling toward Lily and me with her little white shaggy dog dressed in a red doggie overcoat. The lady shouted in her Ethel Merman voice, "Is he friendly?" She was too far away to hear an answer. As she came right at us, again she shouted, "Is he friendly?" I said, "Lily won't hurt your dog." As soon as I said that, Lily hunkered down in her library lion pose. The lady thought she was so cute, but I was suspicious. I grabbed Lily just as she lunged and barked at the dressed-up mop dog. No harm done. Although maybe the lady now thinks I am mistaken about my dog. The woman kept walking and greeted a friend further up the path. I strained my ears to catch if she said anything about being traumatized by our little canine exchange, but I was too far away to hear. She seemed to be onto other things. I was amused and grateful that it all worked out. Lily is friendly with other dogs and rarely barks, but I'm not sure she understood that this dog was really a dog!

Rick Bursky

The mayor ordered a statue of himself
erected at the stop of a steep road that twisted
up from the beach. It took five days
to find a large rock that looked like him.

-Rick Bursky
from The Growers Of Olive Trees
The Soup of Something Missing by Rick Bursky


A man on a bicycle late in the day,
shadow following at his heels,
an eclipse of sorts stretching

-Rick Bursky
from The Man Who Sharpened Pencils
The Soup of Something Missing by Rick Bursky


Slowly lower yourself
to the water, like the quiet book returning
to a shelf in a library.

-Rick Bursky from The Lover's Bath
The Soup of Something Missing by Rick Bursky

William Carlos Williams

It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.

-William Carlos Williams

Bob Dylan

Let's face it, you're either serious about what you're doing or you're not serious about what you're doing. And you can't mix the two. And life is short.
-Bob Dylan

Anaïs Nin

The few moments of communion with the world are worth the pain, for it is a world for others, an inheritance for others, a gift to others, in the end. When you make a world tolerable for yourself, you make a world tolerable for others.
-Anaïs Nin

Furry Dream

I dreamt I was in my grandmother's apartment on Brighton Beach. The apartment had new occupants who had painted the bedroom walls deep purple. They had kept the kitchen wallpaper, and I was examining the pattern closely. It was yellow with a repeat pattern of a kitchen stove with pots and pans hanging above it drawn in black line with white ornamental dots, dashes, and swirls. In the corner of the bedroom I found an old birthday gift that was for both my grandmother and her best friend Sue. In the dream they had the same August birthday.

In real life Sue and Willy were my grandparents' friends who lived in the same apartment building. Sue was perpetually suntanned and slender with a loud husky voice and Willy had a pencil-thin mustache and was pretty quiet. This shared birthday gift in the dream was an elaborately framed needlepoint with their birthdate embroidered on it. Attached somehow were Willy's shoes, which were 70's platform boots spray-painted gold to look bronzed.

The new occupants weren't around, or maybe my husband and I were the new residents, but in another room a family had moved in with twenty cats in cages and five white metal birdcages filled with little blue birds. I was thinking this must be why my lungs feel furry. I recognized this family as my real-life current neighbors.

Snowski

When I walked Lily to the cemetery and the reservoir today I noticed that even more kinds of trees, not just the red maples, had delicate fluff and buds on their branches. I could hear a woodpecker loud and clear. We stopped at the ballfield in Turbesi Park. I was surprised to see the snow in the fenced-in field completely untouched since the last snowfall; no dogs, cats, squirrels, bunnies, or people had walked through it. I blocked off the entrances with the big plastic trash barrels and let Lily run free. She ran in circles like a race horse, and when I threw a snowball for her she caught it in her mouth and hunkered down and ran even faster. Something about catching snowballs makes her go wild. I think it's the sensation of the snowball bursting in her mouth. As Lily ran and built up heat she dipped her mouth into the snow to scoop it, eating it while she was running. She tanked up on all that fresh snow.

Now the baseball field was covered with rings of dog tracks! It looked like a whole pack of dogs had been there. As we played in the snow I spotted a person off in the distance walking awkwardly across the other baseball field. It looked like a very old man in pain. As the person got closer I could see it was a thin middle-aged woman wearing cross-country skis. She moved very tentatively across the snow, almost robotically as if she were recovering from an injury and this was her rehabilitation. As she neared the edge of our baseball field Lily went to the fence, jumping up on her hind legs, hoping meet her, but the woman was looking down, focused on her movement. She skied extremely slowly and methodically across all of the open spaces in the park.

Lily and I headed home. On the way out I could see that the skier had left a meandering trail of long thin lines in the snow. Her ski tracks led to an opening, a gate along the back fence that perhaps opened into her yard. When I got home I wiped Lily down and had a peanut butter and jam sandwich and a cup of hot tea. I fell asleep on the couch and later woke up to the cawing of crows in our tree.

Furry Lungs

Even though it is snowing, the branches of the red maples have fine dangling threads and the ornamental pear trees, which burst with white blossoms in early spring, are now loaded with gray buds. My lungs feel like they are lined with circa-1960 lime-green-and-orange shag carpet, like what my best friend from first grade had in her finished basement with the fake gas fireplace. Today I am distracted by my furry lungs. I feel like I am not well acclimated to this planet, maybe I'm a visitor from Mars, or the deep sea. Drinking hot tea is soothing.

Wacky Wiring

It was late at night and we were driving home on the highway discussing Sail Away Ladies --a song Bill sings while playing the banjo. As I was thinking about the suggestive imagery of the chorus lyrics Don't she rock Daddy O, Don't she rock Daddy O I got a gut rush and then a quick tingling zing through the soles of my feet, running from my heels to my toes. Wacky wiring.

Muddy Monday

I walked through the cemetery today. I often feel an immediate sense of calm stepping off the packed neighborhood street and into the expanse of open space. I love walking along the back path where I can see Harris Pond off in the distance. Today I saw three people out on the ice on the far side of the frozen pond. Two of them were wearing black and one was wearing white. The person in white was almost invisible against the frozen lake. As I walked along the street I saw that the three figures were girls skating. They shouted hello as Lily and I approached. I said hello back, realizing that they must have recognized me and Lily, but they were still too far away for me to see their faces.

When I got to the park Lily ran in the ballfield, chasing a tennis ball and getting spattered with mud on her belly and legs. She was having a blast. A car pulled into the parking lot and four young kids jumped out. Three of them ran over to the circular playground toy that spins around when pushed. The man who accompanied them propelled the spinning thing by grabbing hold of it and running alongside of it. The kids were loving it! Two of them lay on their backs looking up at the sky, their little hooded jackets open and their bellies exposed. I felt vertigo just watching. I bet those kids are his grandchildren, I thought. Then Lily and I walked home. When we got inside I took a washcloth, wet it with warm water, and wiped the mud off of her belly and legs and elbows and paws. She loved it!

Sun Dog Circle

Today I felt like I was under a cloud so after my shower I headed out for a big walk to Harris Pond hoping that the fresh air would wake me and cheer me up. I walked all the way out to the dead end. On the way I said hello to a lady I know from many dog-walking hellos. She said she's still unemployed and moving away this month. I saw a guy working on his car in his driveway and he said hello. I walked on the trail in the woods, and through the bare trees I could see the junk yard of colorful metal off in the distance.
On my way back home I noticed the sun had a huge rainbow ring all around it. There were two sun dogs, one above and one below, that the arc connected. I wanted to point it out to someone on the street. I saw a lady in turquoise who seemed to know me. I showed her the sun ring, and she loved it. Lily jumped up to greet the young man who was with her; he was happy to be hugged by Lily. He said I love big dogs! Further on I saw two long black funeral limos pull in to Savini's parking lot. Everyone got out and stood around in their long black coats; a few were consoling each other. I wanted to tell them to look up at the big circular rainbow, but I didn't want to intrude. I kept walking. I saw Jamie our mail lady and I showed her. She was ecstatic. "I've never seen anything like it in my whole life!" she said. When I got home, I came inside and shook the sand out of my shoes. Later, when Bill arrived, he said he too had seen the sun dogs and ring while driving home.