ft ground

[pdf]

[pdf]

[pdf]

Anything else to add before I start over with a plot and Robin Cook’s style?

Your name doesn’t amble anything physical anymore
But we talked about you
Yesterday
Bebe
How the world is still the same
But your fine curl of life
Is wrapped around a few of us
Making us sometimes choke on your fur’s shadow, and
We smile
Like you couldn’t help but do
When seen in profile.

So many flies gather
In the center of the country
I think they are too small and
Too weak
To evade its gravity.

I pull to the left lane at every exit
So that I don’t get drawn down
Into it
Drive as fast as this rental car can
Approach the coast of safety.

Although it is night, and before the
Stars
Glare from the cars on the highway
Complete a hollow vacuum that I cannot conjure from my
Motel Bed
Where the lucid terror of hitting a stationary object at
Eighty miles per hour
Is too abstract
For a mind picture exploding into threads
Of long paste, light enough to
Float
Through the windshield
Protected like the memory of upholstery foam.

Happy 57th birthday to Bebe the intern!

After 7 years, I finished ‘Recherche’ yesterday sitting in the yard under the flightpath from Hartsfield Jackson. It makes you a giant. Read it.

Thanks to Saucemaster for hosting a piece of writing that did not seem to belong here. If phe ever decides to compose anything mediocre phe should know that it would find a comfortable peerage at From the Ground!

The reason I write this on one of these cards is because this is where it will die. I had seen two dead adult birds further up the road, laying almost together. The baby bird I happened upon then did not startle my stride until a few paces after I had passed it with the visual memory of movement. The chick kicked its legs and its mouth wallowed noiselessly. A patron had pulled a clerk out of the store, which lay in the shade of the tree from which the chick had fallen, in order to gawk. The cries of adult birds filled the trees. Having heard that birds will not assist chicks fallen from the nest and that they would not attend to the chick if it were replaced in the nest, which I could not reach anyway, I felt it was a first step to get the bird off of the sidewalk. I picked up the bird upon a blank white card. It lay, kicking its legs out, its head turned, or cranked, too far around, its tiny black eyes, lolled glassily. A pair of fools approached, one of each sex, and began making remarks: “could be a good meal for a stray cat”, or “looks like this guy’s found a new pet.” As I assumed the impish rubbernecking of the four bystanders contained no intention of either feigning compassion or proposing a solution that might ameliorate the bird’s suffering, I cradled the chick with my palm, turned to the little band, and said, much to their bewilderment, “why don’t you get the hell away from me.” I walked a bit further up the road to deposit the chick, on the card, beneath a low hedge off of the sidewalk where it could die concealed in the shade.

‘The body’, no longer ‘her body’, there in a diorama almost set precisely in an alcove filled out with flowers, two roseate globe lamps and two red-shaded tapers, become as a whole array, a fetish upon which the emotions and memories about the woman are channelled, but try as I might, looking upon the face, not quite right, slightly off, as though molded and coated with the crushed petals of a dry mauve flower, and dust, I could not picture a moving living memory, the body had taken them from me, it was not until later, in bed, that I could ’see’ her laughing, with her partial plate and coffee-rasped throat, because what was there and the way it sat in the room was the hinge point in the forgetting process, where life becomes the caricature of ‘the sleeping body’, of ‘her sleeping body’, and it is at that point you are shaken to abandon your attachment to embodied memories, by depositing them onto the fetish doll, and the final time you turn your back, after all the receptional and conversational dismissals, you leave those desires and applications, and equations of ‘her’ upon ‘it’ and you take her away as a completely memorial construction.

An author who assures you that he writes for himself alone and that he does not care whether he is heard or not is a boaster and is deceiving either himself of you. _François Mauriac

When browsing back over the history of this website there is a noticeable trend toward the reduction of personal commentary or anecdotal musing. Certainly since April of this year a mark’d movement towards straight documentation has occurred. This is quite fine and can be related in part to a straight ahead motivation for production that the website is now merely in service to. If ever the site had a different purpose it was in the earlier days when the work was driven by the desire to keep the website active. But, this site has always been predominantly a public storehouse of texts and images for unabated consumption, with, as history would have it, little personal interaction and no directed kudos. It is because of, for me, the conscious decision to display the impersonal prompt of “+ writing” when it is applicable and the ____________________ of nothing doing when it is more often applicable, that I decide to sign off in a sense and allow the work to replace me. It is because, responding to M. Mauriac’s challenge above, I am not a boaster, I do not publish these pieces with any hopes of association with my self, they are in fact solely for public consumption in this forum. Whatever private satisfaction I get from the production of these works is in the end private. This is not to say that input would not be welcome for once in the history of the project. But instead that any input should be about the work and in service of the perpetuation of the work.

Spending the afternoon fruitlessly searching for a cozy chair to read in, I visited a number of warehouse style second-hand stores all sitting stranded on fractured and expansive stretches of tarmac. I had what might be called an epiphany while sitting down to rest in the third store.

(more…)

After 4+ years at its original webhome on istink.com FtGround Publications is finally moving to its own domain. I would like to extend the greatest appreciation to cousin Paul for hosting the site and supporting my endeavours. It has been very pleasant to type ‘istink’ into my browser every day.

Please come back often!