Jay Wrote

It Could Have Happened Like This… December, 1959. Betty and Truman on opposite ends of a lime green polyester couch at a party in The Village, nodding in angular bebop time with an eyes-closed piano player who danced a nervous shuffle in his pork-pie hat. Capote yawned: “Betty my dear, do you think that I should fly to Cannes with Jackie Kennedy? Or take the train to see that bad boy in Kansas?” Behind smudged glasses, his eyes strayed as a muscled boy tangoed an empty tray through the crowd. Betty kicked at him with a red pointy-toed shoe. “Damn it, Truman, first fetch me another drink. Two olives, lime twist and just a rumor of vermouth.” Truman rubbed his sore ankle, rolled off the settee and careened a rolling stumble across the room. Martini in one hand, Old Crow and Lucky Strike in the other, Capote returned, swayed and hiccuped back to her: “Cannes or Kansas, Betty?” Betty sipped in the smoky party, twirled the gla...

  Newcomer We scrambled over micah-flaked white quartz outcrops   that caught streaks of gold from the sun descending from Camel's Hump. Our hilltop playground of low fortresses, whales, dinner tables and dragon spines. Around the dirt road bend and through a lane of aging maples, Mary Azarian, a New Yorker, (so they say) moved to a gray-weathered farmhouse and  my grandma's unneighborly resentments. An Armenian banjo-picker husband augured Goddard College’s as-yet unnamed hippies down Plainfield way.    They didn’t farm the place or  hold down "real" jobs. She tied a red scarf round her billy goat’s neck and claimed she was an artist. The source of aversion was undivulged. Was it rock-ribbed conservatism? Puritan favor for “productive” work?   Depression-era calluses  rubbed into her farmer soul?     Only prejudice, unyielding like the sto...

These, except for an online version of It Could Have Happened Like This,  and Manoomin, are unpublished and I reserve copyright. I wrote as a lawyer, fundraiser, report-maker and supervisor daily for decades.  And a couple of articles, fact sheets, brochures and the like.  (A family member recently found me credited in a manual with information on the rights of Minnesota teens to obtain medical care.  I think that law is mainly unchanged; I hope so, since my last youth law work was in the mid-'90s.) Some great rewards from that work that I'll have to write about some day. But it was not until 2001 that I began to write creatively, just a little therapy piece of 40 pages, after troubles and beauty in Paris. Then I was invited to our friend Betty's 80th birthday with the charge to all being - "Only presents allowed are poetry."  And somehow, very quickly, I t Could Have Happened Like This happened.  Betty loved it. Soon thereafter, I took a cure for ...

Prospect Park In a bare tree over melting snow eternity’s white owl snares its roost and watches for opportunity. Slipping up the winding path to the witch’s brim dog, dad and daughter perambulate. Hound strains against the leash coats bleed colors into the morning. Caught amidst academics’ real estate – a modern urban instant. Back below, a pair of hawks rout the owl, scrabble back and forth on the oak and assume it’s perch in time and possibility.

Courtney Barnett - Tell Me How You Really Feel,  An Appreciation by Jay Wilkinson   Thanks to daughter Sara for this variegated purple and gray lp.  First things first:   Know that this is a guitar rock album and that Barnett drives the album hard with her lyrics and guitar.   For the moment just let the lyrics speak for themselves - without compromise, feminist, ironic, caustic, poetically doubtful, powerful. But first this is a guitar album.   I’ll give the Patti Smith Band, Nirvana, Hendrix, L7, Byrds, Neil Young as reference points and probable influences.   Especially Nirvana and Young in her disregard for traditional tunefulness.   Barnett’s tendency is to burst forth with angular slashing chords and solos.   Several of the faster songs seem to have been deliberately fuzz-toned in comparison to other sharply-reproduced, expanded sonically, slower but equally emphatic slow songs. I’ll listen more to see if there is a call f...

Untitled,  Pretentious, take 7                               Rhythm, form and timbre frame the aural art.   Graven gold and oak dapple sunlight over a Titian nude.   Stark angled metals carve Rauschenberg’s collages. The brass eyepiece of a whaler's glass shuts out ocean swells and fixes sight upon Leviathan.   Poets’ ropes draw reason toward the deeper prize. Well-aimed harpoons hook minds to revelation. Words plunge beneath the story line and visions veil our certainty.   From select residuals, rise these portents of transcendence.

Spectral Analysis Every celebrity bankrupt emerges in his own special flame descending Gulfstream steps a flare of jet fuel, Chanel and Courvoisier singeing red nylon Karrastan on an exclusive corner of the Palm Springs tarmac choking ground crew and igniting paparazzi. Everyday poverty walks an obscured midnight shuffle profane ashes of the third demand for rent cemented by seeping mud from cattail marshes that drain the buckling verges of Brookdale parking lots. …. Goodwill cargo pants pockets lined with smooth oval stones.

Onsen (Mineral Spring on Nara Road) Steam lit by Shikoku’s spill of stars chin immersed below sulfured nostrils haunted by an ill-considered trade of land and tools for glory, the tatami-makers’ son calculates the cost of a bitter final blend. A bamboo cylinder like tarnished gold, captures a moment’s splashing rill. The pool of koi it tips to fill and with martial obedience straightens to a vertical stance. Fins and tails flutter to greet each spill and fall back       a tumble of antique coins, short the price of the necromancer's purse. Water driven salutes ring bamboo warnings on Buddha's shallow begging bowl.   Respiration set slow to shishi odoshi rhythms. A blade folded in cotton. (shishi odoshi = a bamboo water device to make noise to scare deer from gardens)

Life In A City    Last night I stopped at the Cambodian Chinese restaurant, Kim Huoy Chor, a block west of Snelling on University.  It was an Embers back some decades. I was on my own and brought in the Atlantic Monthly to read while working my way through the more than satisfactory buffet.  All you can eat plus a drink for under $10 including tax. Not the super-shiny mass production buffets that seem to be popping up in malls around the area. So shoot me, I like all you can eat, even if it gets soggy sometimes. There were about 5 other tables occupied.  Two ~ 45-50 year old guys ate and skipped back and forth in matching books and discussed Heideiger (sp.?), existentialism and other such things well beyond me.  At one point one of them mentions “Schlomo Levin (or some such name) – he was a German Jewish philosopher in the last century.” In the booth behind them, a young woman turned around and said:  “I was at Macalester with Schlomo Levi...

Emma in Exile A shrunken displaced person stands dishonored astride a Curtis Mathis console. Her torch shadows scattered Walmart fences and splintered barricades shielding the illiterate and oblivious from the odor of ozone, rot and danger. photo from The Sun, issue 387

Notre Dame Past boats topped with greening gardens and boats with empty cold cafes Beneath hoary old bridges, where the rich still dare not sleep, but others cook on barrel fires. Past shiny sculpture and rusted iron rings in squared-off stones Beneath tourists and busses, under brasseries and homes of the bourgeoisie A rushing green spring Seine and I trail fingers along the base of our winged lady.

From Salpetriere to L’Odeon At night streets revert to eighty winding lanes. The people retreat behind locked doors traffic disappears pedestrians grow scarce and darkness becomes a stage for the mosque’s bowed reflection in the Seine for the street cleaner splashing cobbles for the bright bourgeois party behind thin curtains for the Roman wall shouldering up against St. Genevieve for the shuttered shops of Rue Mouffetard for the exile home of Thomas Paine for the pocked memories of the resistance on Sorbonne walls. And there! Behind those garden gates and past the stone facades – TheTour Eiffel explodes in a bright finale!

Independence Day                                  A symbol glares from old elm at Minnehaha at SUV patriots. Sharp hooked talons grip Gray furred prey on the crooked branch Gold beak rips morsels and jerks and swallows. Excited children dance as tail parts fall like snow.

Snow Roller Axe hewn oak, cracked, patched and rust stained by iron bands and clamped on an axle centering a horse-high drum, the roller frame was burnished by shoulders of three generations. The snow roller packed Cabot’s back roads for fifty winters before town meeting voted to buy a plow. With a click of a tongue and a “hut, hut, hut” Will Walker lead Molly and Meg past yearlings and stretching barn cats. Under the light of  the cloud-veiled moon  four ears cocked back, steam rose from grinding jaws, icicles dripped from snuffling nostrils  and hooves beat an uneven tattoo. Will pulled off his woolen mitts and  harnessed the mares with straps and buckles  to the handmade rig - his inheritance and burden.  Will yawned, pulled his buffalo robe tight  and buried chin in chest to duck the whistling wind. With a rattle of reins and a quiet “git-up” Molly, Meg and the snow roller crunched free from last w...