Asparagus

It is easier to harvest the asparagus in the morning while facing east. Facing this way, the stalks glow, Madonna-like, around their peripheries. So walk with a little serrated knife towards the sun. Walking backwards, turning west, the field is illuminated by the low sun and all the grass is so bright it looks white instead of green. The asparagus is hidden in this monotonous green-white. So walk east slowly, hips dipping while stepping into some mysterious hole.

Sounds, dark boot on straw, wind turning the years-old widow-maker into wooden chimes, a goat groaning and rubbing his black and white body against the spoke of a large wheel, like someone one bed over in the ER who is suffering worse than you. A robin is in balanced conversation with rapid rifle shots.

Reading the ground, sixteen rows. Like reading sixteen long pages, turning around like turning the page, every other page obstructed by some trick of the light. The light makes green look white? Reading a long book for a long time, reading a long book for a long time.

I am alone with this field’s first asparagus. The field is on a hill, facing east there’s a tree line marking a forest, also a stone fence. Deer, four, six, eight at a time stand watching me, like a family watching TV. Out of necessity they have become extremely courageous and when I say “go away!” sometimes they just don’t. Coughing into the grass.

Some of the asparagus look thick like thumbs. Others are thinner than a pencil. When I find one, I squat down and, backlit, the stalks down the line look just like a skyline. I’ve seen Manhattan look like this. Green candles, the light comes through them from behind and the color is dipped. I’ve seen Manhattan look like this, with a belly of water, the wind comes, and the architecture is miraculously full of people.

Sound of a heavy boot on dry grass, robin song followed by gun. Does the bird think the shots are a type of song?

It’s pretty awful, the bill that’s on my mind I mean. You’d think it’s just asparagus on my mind but I’m thinking about debt. And as I walk I count up to sixteen, at a certain point I lose track of the number but for a while there was not much to think about besides the proceeding count.

Squat down, skyline, glowing green, Madonna-like. Reading a long book for a long time. Some of the asparagus responded to last night’s near frost by slumping over. Gesture of defeat, translucent. I am fascinated by the way intense cold can burn.

I’ve lost count, I’ve counted up to eighteen but that’s impossible. The rows here at the end, they are a later variety. I’ll expect to see them later, next week probably. One or two have already arrived and they are very long. Over here I am basically below the widow-maker, and the goat is screaming on and on. One of these asparaguses has grown up twisted.

When I bought my car insurance, the salesperson said would you like a discount? You just have to drive a minimum number of miles safely for a period of time, we will track your miles on an app. I was hesitant to be tracked but I said yes because I am desperate for a discount. But then I got sick and the muffler fell off, so there were two reasons why I didn’t want to go anywhere for a while, I just stayed at home. Then yesterday I got a letter saying: you failed completely, you incompetent bitch, you don’t belong in this world and everyone you have ever met is trying to get in touch with you, respond immediately or else.

And you know what? They used those words verbatim.

I am alone with some of the first asparagus of the year. Why would one person ever want another person to suffer? Is it because they don’t know them personally? Is it because they know them too well and have a grudge? Oh, suffering is the nature of things? It’s the discord that the singing bird coheres?

The Cost of a Poem, written sometime last spring:

Usually I keep these thoughts to myself but now I have a fever. I was so passionately angry. I didn’t know if my anger was right and I still don’t. I was angry about the way I was treated. I wanted someone to look me in the eye but no one would. From where I was sitting at my 15-dollars-an-hour position behind the desk, everyone in the room was a Writer except for me. Everyone wanted to be there but I had to be there because I was being paid to be there. Yes this was my bad attitude but it was also a palpable situation. I was watching poets network with each other. Anyways I realized in that moment that poetry goes in a book and a book almost always costs money. I had been confused about that for the duration of my life. My mom would recite poems to me before bed. For this reason I didn’t think that money had anything to do with poems but now I see it does.

On my drive home I left a voice message with my friend. I thought I sounded incredibly upset, as I was driving it felt like my chest was on fire. But when I listen back now I sound very calm. This is what I said: Also, I said it so slowly:

“Poetry probably appeals uuuuh

to the rich because

any uh

definable sense

is only clearly detected

if you have time to

leisurely time

to notice.

And because they have the time to notice

they are able to fall in love with creation deeper and deeper

and respond to its endangerment with passion and yet

their passion is more like uh

sort of like uh

empathy

the kind of empathy that is static and quite neutral or even bad

Where you notice what it takes to be alive

Just the stuff of life

and that means something to you so then you

feel the pain of someone who maybe doesn’t have it

and that might come out in your poetry

but what else

And then it is uh fearful sort of

There’s a lie, there’s like a lie happening?

But it’s more like a misunderstanding

where someone might believe what the poet says

or that the poet holds these sort of solipsistic visions

and then the pain when it turns out that they were confused and

you were confused by them

it’s like, um, heartbreak.”

I remember saying this on my drive in my otherwise silent car. It was very late to be driving home. What would a poet notice about this situation? Dust on the dashboard, the malfunctioning speedometer in kilometers-per-hour, trash below the passenger’s seat, check oil light, the rejected inspection sticker, the broken passenger’s mirror, my own hands. What I’m proposing is that poets tend to notice their physical surroundings or interiors. This is my new theory: what you notice is not only what you are noticing, it is also a reflection of how much free time you have to notice.

Here’s an example from a chef, not a poet. Once I praised a chef for his decision to work with entirely local produce. He said, yes it’s expensive but I have an abundance mindset. I thought that was beautiful and amazing until I learned about his trust fund. Abundance mindset? You’re deluded.

I don’t have the time to be a poet and I wouldn’t want to either, because the world would look wrong. By wrong I mean just one way, all the other ways I’d ignore because I wouldn’t know how to do anything differently, my time would float me so high above others that I would not be able to comprehend the possibility that I might exploit them.

I only have the time to write this because I’m sick. I got sick at work. My fever won’t go away and I am so angry. The fever has cooked my brain and made me realize that I can express my anger. I’ve been wronged by every thought for sale. There’s a game, I’m losing it, because I do not want to win.

-

In order to fall in love with creation, we must have the time. But to have the time to know is correlated with having the money to have the time. With money for time, it looks like you may have the opportunity to get to know the sensual world but it is only an illusion.

A poem’s presence may have a timeless quality in that the state of presence the poem was written under was marked by an excess of free time. A timeless poem is illustrative of the sensual world and may even inspire the reader to deepen their relationship to their senses. For example, plums in an ice box.

However, it feels like my personal time is inside an oven. My accuracy with the time, with the kitchen timers for example, is a lot like presence except I’m exhausted. And my time is not my own.

Unlimited time looks like timelessness because in that vastness all the measurements besides the poignant ones become arbitrary. It’s my anger speaking now.

Timeless may also mean less time or having very little time at all, but it doesn’t mean that. If someone were to have very little time (or dignity) of their own, then their poem would be too specific to be timeless. Their poem would be located in a net of constraints that are horrible.

Timeless presence is an illusion. It does not get us closer to the stuff of life. Because the stuff of life is unique to each life. It’s almost like there has to be the same number of poets as humans on the planet and each of the voices must be equally respected. No one’s time taken more seriously and no one’s one presence slapping a story down of how presence ought to be.

Timelessness like a machine wrote it. The writers who have time cannot fathom that someone may live without time. So why are they talking to me without listening? Why’s the book doing that?

Why would I direct my anger here when there are other places to send it? It’s because the poem is where I go for comfort. But these poems do not bring comfort, their scaffolding is constructed from the discard of a large-scale violence, from those who have the time towards those who don’t.

I think time-wealthy poets should stop writing poetry and then give all their money away. Once the money is gone, they’ll have nothing left but to write poetry. With what materials then and for what audience? The scale of a poem would become a conversation. There’d be more listening than talking.

I’m not trying to say there are no poor poets. Rather, how many people are tricked into believing something about presence by someone who has unlimited free time?

-

I’ve always been bothered when the rich read books about the poor for education or entertainment. This so often happens because books do cost money. I remember sitting in a girl’s parked Tesla, we were talking about this, I was looking up at the stars through the glass roof and thinking, what is going on?

If you are wealthy, there’s almost nothing you can understand. I notice that the more I acquire, the less I understand. Those who understand the most own the least because they have to literally “stand under” or be under so much. There is no objective reality but the reality that is most true for most people is the one seen through the eyes of the poor. This vision is vigilant, massive, expansive, because being poor is dangerous.

How did it happen that I grew up thinking that poetry was for the people? Well I think that poetry is for the people. Time, I believe, is also for the people. But the way things are now, time has been un-peopled. Which means that poetry is un-peopled. Poetry got moneyed and has been that way for a long time.

The ruling class is a death cult and if a poem is written by a ruler then what the hell do they have to say to me that’s of any use. I can’t believe it took me this long to realize that sometimes poets, actually a lot of the time, belong to this class. I wanna read poor writers who are chronically comprehending this incomprehensible weight, and through the strength of having no time, are imagining something better than this.

I hate the rich because of the random power they have and for all that they cannot understand. I hate the rich because of their smooth expensive watch that may as well be sunlight moving gently on a lake. I hate the rich because what am I going to do? Gain their respect? What poetry can I do now?

Time gently moving across an owned lake, dappled owned daylight on owned water. It is beautiful. I’m confused, it is beautiful? You know one day if I’m lucky I won’t understand this angst anymore. If I’m lucky?

-

If you want to be a beautiful writer, all you have to do is write beautiful things.