George Oppen: Escape from ants, water meters, and the revival of the Melita coffee filter cone

We had quite a start to the day:  The café-presse broke, as café-presses will do, right when you want coffee;  Dobby discovered non-hairball inspired projectile vomiting, which I joyously cleaned up; I infused twice the amount of an antibiotic and decided to care less; The West of the Lone Alp Tête de Hergé Water Municipal OverLordShip sent us the sweetest municipal worker ever, even if he did keep slapping me on the shoulder [He told me that I "looked fetching today," so he can slap the hell out of that boneless hump as much as he likes, and he also declared the outrageous water readings to be the fault of the electronic doodad and not the result of a gushing leak, or my two diuretics.]; Then the ants attacked, again, this time traversing the back porch, the kitchen window, and proceeding, lemming-like, to drown themselves, en masse, in a sink full of soapy water.  This was accomplished in the course of 30 minutes, as I *know* there were no aunts committing suicide a half hour earlier, when I so carefully hooked myself up to the wrong antibiotic -- right next to the Death Pool of soapy Lemon Ajax.  Meanwhile, the Special-Oh-So-Special Topiary Team arrived to try and rectify some of the burgeoning Labyrinth issues... and we had to send La Bonne et Belle Bianca Castafiore out to oversee their work, despite her obsessive reworking of the Jewel Song (Gounod's Air des bijoux) into a soulful Lithuanian version.  Unfortunately, her tendency to transpose parts with Latvian translation... well, we're not sure her focus is entirely on the correct training of the British Boxwoods.

I signed up last week for the Poem-A-Day service of the Academy of American Poets.

That can be a real life-saver on mornings such as this 'un.

And as I calmed down, I realized I didn't like today's poem much.  So I locked myself in the Computer Turret (one day soon, I'll explain the modifications we've made to accomodate slithering into that space from a power chair, with CRPS-flaring legs, a reconstructed ankle and elbow, a prosthetic hip, one prosthetic shoulder, and one shoulder gone missing... using the rope ladder/bridge strung from our small tower to the barn, now the Rehab Center for Carnies and Wayward Acrobats.)

And I spent several hours with George Oppen, renewed that love.  Fred was good enough to ferry up a thermos of excellent coffee mid-afternoon, and the Marlinspike Hall Domestic Staff showed me the kindness of pretending they didn't know it was me up here delivering my usual arias of "damndamndamndamn" when the Screaming Ninny CRPS Dystonia Spasms showed up.

I'm in a sharing mood, as your current thought ("Dear Jeezus, does she have to share everything?") attests.

Courtesy of the Poetry Foundation, my intention to start a sort of poetry war action, and my outright theft of their holdings, here are Sections 1-22 of Oppen's Of Being Numerous:

1

There are things

We live among ‘and to see them

Is to know ourselves’.

Occurrence, a part

Of an infinite series,

The sad marvels;

Of this was told

A tale of our wickedness.

It is not our wickedness.

‘You remember that old town we went to, and we sat in the ruined window, and we tried to imagine that we belonged to those times—It is dead and it is not dead, and you cannot imagine either its life or its death; the earth speaks and the salamander speaks, the Spring comes and only obscures it—’

2

So spoke of the existence of things,

An unmanageable pantheon

Absolute, but they say

Arid.

A city of the corporations

Glassed

In dreams

And images—

And the pure joy

Of the mineral fact

Tho it is impenetrable

As the world, if it is matter,

Is impenetrable.

3

The emotions are engaged

Entering the city

As entering any city.

We are not coeval

With a locality

But we imagine others are,

We encounter them. Actually

A populace flows

Thru the city.

This is a language, therefore, of New York

4

For the people of that flow

Are new, the old

New to age as the young

To youth

And to their dwelling

For which the tarred roofs

And the stoops and doors—

A world of stoops—

Are petty alibi and satirical wit

Will not serve.

5

The great stone

Above the river

In the pylon of the bridge

‘1875’

Frozen in the moonlight

In the frozen air over the footpath, consciousness

Which has nothing to gain, which awaits nothing,

Which loves itself

6

We are pressed, pressed on each other,

We will be told at once

Of anything that happens

And the discovery of fact bursts

In a paroxysm of emotion

Now as always.   Crusoe

We say was

‘Rescued’.

So we have chosen.

7

Obsessed, bewildered

By the shipwreck

Of the singular

We have chosen the meaning

Of being numerous.

8

Amor fati

The love of fate

For which the city alone

Is audience

Perhaps blasphemous.

Slowly over islands, destinies

Moving steadily pass

And change

In the thin sky

Over islands

Among days

Having only the force

Of days

Most simple

Most difficult

9

‘Whether, as the intensity of seeing increases, one’s distance from Them, the people, does not also increase’

I know, of course I know, I can enter no other place

Yet I am one of those who from nothing but man’s way of thought and one of his dialects and what has happened to me

Have made poetry

To dream of that beach

For the sake of an instant in the eyes,

The absolute singular

The unearthly bonds

Of the singular

Which is the bright light of shipwreck

10

Or, in that light, New arts! Dithyrambic, audience-as-artists! But I will listen to a man, I will listen to a man, and when I speak I will speak, tho he will fail and I will fail. But I will listen to him speak. The shuffling of a crowd is nothing—well, nothing but the many that we are, but nothing.

Urban art, art of the cities, art of the young in the cities—The isolated man is dead, his world around him exhausted

And he fails! He fails, that meditative man! And indeed they cannot ‘bear’ it.

11

            it is that light

Seeps anywhere, a light for the times

In which the buildings

Stand on low ground, their pediments

Just above the harbor

Absolutely immobile,

Hollow, available, you could enter any building,

You could look from any window

One might wave to himself

From the top of the Empire State Building—

Speak

If you can

Speak

Phyllis—not neo-classic,

The girl’s name is Phyllis—

Coming home from her first job

On the bus in the bare civic interior

Among those people, the small doors

Opening on the night at the curb

Her heart, she told me, suddenly tight with happiness—

So small a picture,

A spot of light on the curb, it cannot demean us

I too am in love down there with the streets

And the square slabs of pavement—

To talk of the house and the neighborhood and the docks

And it is not ‘art’

12

‘In these explanations it is presumed that an experiencing subject is one occasion of a sensitive reaction to an actual world.’

the rain falls

that had not been falling

and it is the same world

. . .

They made small objects

Of wood and the bones of fish

And of stone. They talked,

Families talked,

They gathered in council

And spoke, carrying objects.

They were credulous,

Their things shone in the forest.

They were patient

With the world.

This will never return, never,

Unless having reached their limits

They will begin over, that is,

Over and over

13

           unable to begin

At the beginning, the fortunate

Find everything already here. They are shoppers,

Choosers, judges; . . . And here the brutal

is without issue, a dead end.

                                            They develop

Argument in order to speak, they become

unreal, unreal, life loses

solidity, loses extent, baseball’s their game

because baseball is not a game

but an argument and difference of opinion

makes the horse races. They are ghosts that endanger

One’s soul. There is change

In an air

That smells stale, they will come to the end

Of an era

First of all peoples

And one may honorably keep

His distance

If he can.

14

I cannot even now

Altogether disengage myself

From those men

With whom I stood in emplacements, in mess tents,

In hospitals and sheds and hid in the gullies

Of blasted roads in a ruined country,

Among them many men

More capable than I—

Muykut and a sergeant

Named Healy,

That lieutenant also—

How forget that? How talk

Distantly of ‘The People’

Who are that force

Within the walls

Of cities

Wherein their cars

Echo like history

Down walled avenues

In which one cannot speak.

15

Chorus (androgynous): ‘Find me

So that I will exist, find my navel

So that it will exist, find my nipples

So that they will exist, find every hair

Of my belly, I am good (or I am bad),

Find me.’

16

‘. . . he who will not work shall not eat,

and only he who was troubled shall find rest,

and only he who descends into the nether world shall rescue his beloved,

and only he who unsheathes his knife shall be given Isaac again. He who will not work shall not eat. . .

but he who will work shall give birth to his own father.’

17

The roots of words

Dim in the subways

There is madness in the number

Of the living

‘A state of matter’

There is nobody here but us chickens

Anti-ontology—

He wants to say

His life is real,

No one can say why

It is not easy to speak

A ferocious mumbling, in public

Of rootless speech

18

It is the air of atrocity,

An event as ordinary

As a President.

A plume of smoke, visible at a distance

In which people burn.

19

Now in the helicopters the casual will

Is atrocious

Insanity in high places,

If it is true we must do these things

We must cut our throats

The fly in the bottle

Insane, the insane fly

Which, over the city

Is the bright light of shipwreck

20

—They await

War, and the news

Is war

As always

That the juices may flow in them

Tho the juices lie.

Great things have happened

On the earth and given it history, armies

And the ragged hordes moving and the passions

Of that death. But who escapes

Death

Among these riders

Of the subway,

They know

But now as I know

Failure and the guilt

Of failure.

As in Hardy’s poem of Christmas

We might half-hope to find the animals

In the sheds of a nation

Kneeling at midnight,

Farm animals,

Draft animals, beasts for slaughter

Because it would mean they have forgiven us,

Or which is the same thing,

That we do not altogether matter.

21

There can be a brick

In a brick wall

They eye picks

So quiet of a Sunday

Here is the brick, it was waiting

Here when you were born

Mary-Anne.

22

Clarity

In the sense of transparence,

I don’t mean that much can be explained

Clarity in the sense of silence.

George Oppen, “Of Being Numerous (1-22)” from New Collected Poems. Copyright © 1968 by George Oppen. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

Source: New Collected Poems (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2008)

Ants be damned, water workers be blessed, gratitude for Melita coffee filter cones, and thanks to Fred, but most especially thanks to George Oppen, who nailed poems to wood, and who STAVED, STAVED, STAVED, and singularly rendered it a not-necessarily transitive verb.

$3 Million

What a morning.  Don't trust surgical paper tape to hold your PICC line thingies firmly attached to your forearm, and forget that ridiculous webbed fabric designed to hold everything in place.  I woke to find my two ports and their attached plastic tubules all a-wandering around the bed, one even under a Maine Coon.

For the record, I've decided that Buddy was misnamed, by me.  Instead of following Fred's advice of waiting for the cat to name itself, I rushed and forced "Buddy" upon him.  He is clearly a "Bubba." Whatever the case, he answers to bonito flakes.  We are actually concerned now that he is not putting on sufficient weight to compensate for the alarming length he has acquired.  He's a thin guy, not a swarthy molecule to my Bubba, no.

The great thing about finding blood in your PICC lines for the third or fourth times, is that it is the third or fourth time, and you didn't expire during those first few incidences, so likelihood is in your favor.

Also, I was all wrapped up in this warm dream about being offered $3 million by some lawyer that my infectious disease dood introduced to me, in a meeting with him, both of my PAs (Jacqueline and Susan), the wondrous on-site pharmacist (Lauren), and yes, this swell dude in a three-piece tweed suit and a bowler.  No shit!  Very clever and full of excitement, I had Fred drive us to the Best Credit Union West of the Lone Alp in Tête de Hergé.  He was pretty pissed (in real life as in my sleeping version) at me for bossing him around, didn't want to go to the Credit Union.  I don't know why, they love him there.  He shows them his sweet, shy side and is sweet on Ruth, the Head Credit Union Honchette.

They have lots of rocking chairs, braided rugs, beautiful quilts on the walls, chocolate cookies and milk in one corner, also a cage for toddlers disguised as a welcoming play pen.

Anyway, I zoomed into my banking institution, gave Ruth the eye, and she and I left Fred in a rocking chair with a spare Credit Union cat and an experimental latte (they're trying out a bikini barista -- bikinis à la Annette Funicello).

Framed art print for sale at eu.artcom

So Ruth opened a few dozen accounts, some for me, some for Fred, one for Bianca, one each for the Brother-Units, one for a few former best friends.  I gave Ruth a big freaking tip which she deftly tucked into her G-cup over-the-shoulder-boulder-holder.

Then I make Fred drive us to a car dealership.  Not just any car dealership, but the one that sells the car of his dreams.  You know, the old Pagani Zonda dealership.  You can find them, usually, near a KFC.  Anyway, yes, the order is in for one Zonda 760LH, (convertible).

The dream ended there, almost.  The last memory I have of it is receiving a phone call from Doctor ShoulderMan who told me two things:  that he had bought me a home of  my own, where I could live, comfortably, safely, and happily alone, and that in it he had put a very special bed that would ease much of my pain.

Then I woke up.

Back to the bloody PICC lines, the Former Buddy, a sweet-natured Dobby, and the echo of a slammed bathroom door that I assume came from the aforementioned Fred.  Marmy Fluffy Butt's tail drifted in and out of my sclerotic vision.  Sven, no doubt tightly spooned with La Bonne et Belle Bianca Castafiore, gave an angry yell at the door slam, then apparently lapsed back into the redemptive, cushy love of our Diva.

I am tempted to give Fred a new name, too.   And it ain't "Bubba."

So hauling my ass out of this bed without the use of one arm, and with both legs currently in awful shape -- the right refusing to bend at knee or hip for a good few minutes, mostly from swelling, partly from spite -- and with none of the expected orthopedic help apparatus in place.  You know, like a trapeze bar.  Mostly that.  I could do wonders, I could qualify for the Olympics were there a trapeze up there. Marta Károlyi, herself, has said, sighing, "Prof, dah-link, working with the over-bed trapeze would make you incomparable in uneven bars, and with just a little make-up and disguising do-dads, we could slip you into the men's still rings, maybe even the pommel horse.

Marta Károlyi is disappointed in me.  Hey, Marta, gimme $3 million and a decent gourmand for a coach, and I'm your girl/guy.  Kisses to Bela.

I use my wheelchair, parallel-parked by the bed, a cane, and sometimes a grabber, to achieve an upright status.  Lately, frustration has led me to also use a fair amount of force on the underside of the bedside table. This is likely a poor idea, as all things give, all things give way.

Careful to keep our small wing of The Manor steeped in good quiet, I squelched my way to the Medieval Kitchen, stoked the fire (in spite of forecasts of temps above 100 for the day), started the coffee, retrieved a 200 ml medicine ball of daptomycin, three saline flushes, two heparin flushes, two alcohol wipes, and washed the singularity out of my hands.  Wash, wash, wash, clean towel.  

The mewling, meowing, and outright cat screaming interrupts the PICC process and kibble is presented, to each according to the proper bowl, each with its own protocol.  

The kettle whistles precisely in the middle of the PICC flushes, and I opt for quieting the overly excited Paul Revere, since Sven may de-spoon from The Castafiore and come kill me, and Fred might make a fast break to lower the drawbridge, as -- when rudely wakened -- he mistakes loud noises for requests to cross the moat.

So my huge scoop of Italian roast is sitting in its nice hot water in my café presse, and I start the 9-minute timer in my head.  That's right -- I steep the stuff for 9 minutes, despite the expert admonition to stop at four. I'm a freaking radical.

So there are two ports, one purple, one red.  Because daptomycin only needs to be given once a day, we cleverly use the purple port for all infusions and the red one for all blood draws.  Red::blood, get it?  Because, yes, unbelievably, when we had to do twice-a-day infusions, and alternate ports, we'd get confused.  But now, all I gotta remember is red is for blood.  

This morning, though, both ports are streaked with blood, and the coffee isn't ready.  So I flush them both, using the whole saline and heparin repertoire, twice.  I have no idea if this will impact anything -- I doubt it, when I stop to think about it, after having done it, after having a few sips of excellent 9-minute café presse Italian roast with a good splash of milk ("It does a body good!").  

Finally, I hook up the stupid medicine ball, which is the whole point.  I am wearing scrubs (great pajamas) because the pockets are perfect for holding medicine balls.  The technical term for these med balls is "elastomeric device," and they look like this, when fresh from the fridge:

See?  So you just tuck the sucker in a large pocket and before you know it, poof!  It's a shrunken bit o'plastic and all the medicine is running around your body, curing you of whatever.  And you've been ambulating, catapulting, scrubbing, and pruning tree branches that loom way too close to a Chagall stained glass that we just discovered this spring.  

This disposable plastic dodad is the kind of inventions that I really admire.  I am not at all sure, but the clever inventors seem to be:

Thompson, Thomas C. (Dallas, TX)

Center, John L. (Dallas, TX)

Stocton, Paul M. (Clarendon Hills, IL)

They called it: WINGED INFUSION HOLDING DEVICE WITH THERMOPLASTIC ELASTOMERIC BODY and the date for the patent is 1974.

Ah, clearly, I have lost le fil de ma pensée.  What a shocker.

Because I haven't even told you about the invasion.  The ant invasion.

I keep a clean Manor, damn it.  There is no sugar being all sexy on my counters or floors.  The honeysuckle is strictly kept in line with the out-of-doors.

So it was that my eyes bugged out to see a four-lane highway of teeny, tiny ants marching, marching, marching, with clear intent and purpose, across the floor of our communal craft room (you know how I feel about scrapbooking!).  

All right, it is not an interesting story and hardly a catastrophe, but for a woman who has yet to take her pain meds, with bloody PICC lines, and who has just rolled her wheelchair through a fresh heavy-on-kibble and very wet hair ball, it wasn't packaged happiness.

Fred, who knows a lot about a lot, later explained to me that sometimes a heat wave will inspire these annoyingly cute little insects to up and move their home base somewhere cooler.  This "somewhere cooler" for our crowd was a certain spot under a large throw rug.  Careful inspection of their destination revealed nothing special -- no spills, no nothing.  Just a huge rally of a few thousand peewee ants.

It took me three hours to feel comfortable that they'd all been eradicated -- and greenly, safely, so as to pose no danger to man, woman, or beast.  I followed their highways and byways, swept, mopped, wept, swept, and mopped some more.  I washed the offensive section of the rug.  I vacuumed the whole damn rug -- each side.

And when I was done, sometime around 2 PM?  Everyone got up, stretching, meandering for the bathrooms, searching for good coffee, murmuring vague "good mornings" to the bloody, red-faced, mop-wielding me.  Only Sven paused to listen to my exciting tale and wonderings about formic acid, scratching his crotch as if a few of the invaders had somehow invaded him.

In my next dream, when I meet with Ruth at the Best Credit Union West of the Lone Alp in Tête de Hergé in order to deposit my $3 million, I get all the money, in cash, and Fred doesn't even have to drive me to the border.  I'll take a cab.

Ruth still gets the wad of bills to stuff in her bra, though.  Fair is fair.