There is a plumb-black flower in my yard, about the size of my thumb but nar­row­er and pret­ti­er. It’s on a stalk of Sun­down­er Moun­tain Flax and it is the white hot cen­ter of a month of hum­ming­bird wars that take place every June. Juve­nile male hum­ming­birds stake out their ter­ri­to­ry in the late spring, and for what­ev­er rea­son, this par­tic­u­lar plant is high­ly regard­ed among these thugs. If I sit on the chaise longue in the back­ground for any amount of time in the morn­ing or in the late after­noon I am treat­ed to a free-for-all cage fight with­out the cages. Their calls are quick clicks, but if you’ve ever heard them slowed down, you’ll know they sound like trilling whales. They dive bomb each oth­er, drink from the flax flow­ers, blast off and blast back, and some­times they’re so wrapped up in the busi­ness at hand, they don’t real­ize they’re float­ing right next to me for a few sec­onds, until they do, and then they’re back in com­bat. These bat­tles usu­al­ly last a minute or two, but some­time they go on and on. There’s nev­er a clear win­ner, at least to me, and while they’re obvi­ous­ly engaged in seri­ous stuff, the dance of light and motion is a salve against my days.

In the hottest bar in Wisconsin
the singer sings about blind white panic
and crys­talline faces com­ing in from the cold.
The dying singer sings about love,
and I can see the band behind her
sigh­ing into the lights.

In the morn­ing, red crows bang
the high-water pylons and fold back into the sky.
The mild sounds : a moist wing, a fin­ger in a trout,
the girl with the hiss­ing lantern
comes down the stairs like water under ice.
The pines are deep in snow, but they don’t know it yet.

One year, I thought I’d try writ­ing a nov­el in Novem­ber. This is the entire result of that her­culean effort :

Lordez is the girl, the one that was at Lisa’s baby’s par­ty, Lordez Rodriguez, which you’d think her mom could’ve said out loud to make sure it didn’t rhyme – no, not Rodriguez, it’s some­thing-ez though. When she told me I want­ed to say “Pleasedez to meetez you.” I think I did say it actu­al­ly, but she didn’t hear me because the rain sound­ed like some­one was hit­ting her car with ham­mers. We didn’t talk at the par­ty, but when it start­ed rain­ing I was ask­ing every­body for a ride and she felt sor­ry for me. We didn’t talk in the car either because the rain was like ham­mers, except she said her name was Lordez Her­nan­dez, and she’s the girl I was talk­ing about the oth­er day.

What are you now ? The por­tion left to sleep is
cry­ing in your sleep. They want to take your leg.
Your oxime­ter chirps behind you. Behind me,
Ban­dit steals a kiss from the Frog.
Ssome­how we smoked and snorted
our way into the same bed, moth­er and son.
If the Snow­man and Fred saw us like this
they’d chew each oth­er to the bone.

Alan fled New Brunswick and his peo­ple there ear­ly last spring, fled their ven­omous cui­sine and their aim­less hump­ing, their fid­dle­heads and their home­made maple rum that inflamed even the old­est of turds to fits of pri­apic square-danc­ing and, lat­er, rut­ting against the cor­ner of the bar ; he fled his moth­er, who had con­vinced her­self it was her shy­ness and crip­pling pas­siv­i­ty that drove Alan’s father to walk into the sea, and who, after hav­ing found the need to “ideate” a new life for her­self, sat down one evening in Feb­ru­ary, shut her eyes, and imag­ined a dar­ling baby, “a beau­ti­ful baby all my own” (Alan found that par­tic­u­lar­ly galling), a baby not made of skin and bone but of fear and anx­i­ety, bun­dled and swad­dled just like a real baby, ten­der and needy just like a real baby, the idea being that car­ing for her fear baby would help her come to terms with her weak­ness rather than let it shame her as it had all her life, which seemed to make sense to Alan, except after a few nights of this, he found his moth­er in her chair, red-faced and groan­ing, her hands crush­ing each oth­er in her lap, and it didn’t take a genius to fig­ure out she was chok­ing the ever lov­ing shit out of her fear baby, which now she was call­ing Alan ; but most of all, he left Monc­ton because Veronique was­n’t ever going to come back.

I’d rather have a cubic zirconium
Than acer­bic meconium.

I fell asleep for a bit this after­noon and dreamed that I got a call from my agent. James Fran­co had request­ed me per­son­al­ly to teach him bird calls, specif­i­cal­ly Cal­i­for­nia shore bird calls, which appar­ent­ly were my spe­cial­ty. I was skep­ti­cal, not sure I could deal with a dilet­tante try­ing to learn in a week what had tak­en me my entire bird­ing career, but I took the job. When I arrived, James Fran­co was sit­ting on a met­al chair in a poor­ly lit con­crete bunker, in an orange t‑shirt and brown pants, whistling like a lunatic. Uncer­tain if I should inter­rupt, I start­ed to set up my play­back sys­tem, which involved reel-to-reel tape recorders, a Super‑8 movie screen, and cock­pit head­sets. Fran­co stopped me. He didn’t want to learn how to iden­ti­fy birds by their calls, he said. He want­ed to learn to whis­tle like the birds. I told him that wasn’t my thing, and he said, “David, we have to learn to speak to the birds. They’re nev­er going to learn how to speak to us.”

What does it mean when you dream you’re at a gallery open­ing watch­ing a video instal­la­tion of Madon­na in a night­gown and tear-stained make-up slap­ping a young, blond, naked Alec Bald­win with a gun ? (One mon­i­tor is a wide shot loop, one a wide slo-mo, one a close-up of the pis­tol nip­ping Alec’s stamen.)

Ask­ing for a friend.