Once the fortunetelling session was over, they stopped by his mother’s, who reminded her of the sick granddaughter and how the illness progressed after which her gypsy suggested they go get coffee in the square where she ran into a friend from school named Lincoln and his new French girlfriend, Nathalie. Because they invited her with them to the beach somewhere for a day or two, she made apologies to her gypsy because she needed to think and gathered her backpack from the hostel’s locker since despite his singing entreaties she had not fully decided to go on living with him. And so she went with Lincoln and Nathalie to stay in their tent on a beach and at night shifted her attention from the massive caterpillar heave of their sleeping bag or how unequal the two of them were, Lincoln less besotted with Nathalie than she herself was when surely Nathalie deserved better. Why had they asked her along after all? The triangle confused since by day she loved Nathalie’s broad-cheeked wistful charm, so bruised and Gallic, all of them rumpled and the two girls buying eternal friendship bracelets from someone on the beach but after a couple of days of sandy headstands, fish dinners, and talks containing the magic of the future in which they would never again meet, she said goodbye and headed back, feeling herself wise and weary on the train to Granada. In the main café in town she ran into her gypsy, handsome and magically wearing a green bright button-down shirt she thought she had lost in her hostel. Maybe she had left it at the cave? All he kept saying with a kind of force was: Did you not bring me anything from your trip? How could you not bring me anything? Gone were the songs and the wobble. In that second she may have understood him saying that her main failure was that she had not yet given his mother money for the sick grandkid. Understanding that for him she may have been something just a bit more or less than a walking dollar sign. Whatever he had professed before, during, or after lay intimately close to a performance of feeling. I cannot let you go-o-o. She had windmilled into his story in which feeling was king. Would it matter that she had been set in his midst? After her, would there not be other travelers, toting their guitars, waists, hunger? After he left, she stayed in the café, mournful. A drummer she had seen in a circle, a drummer from Sierra Leone named Prince, came up to ask why so sad? And she told him and watched his moonlit drum circle that night before going to stay on his floor where she pretended to sleep when he began to touch her bent elbow after which she became the one living with him, eating peanut sauce with rice, the hands of all his friends also dipping into the one bowl. The drummer played bass guitar, a simple unskilled stuttered reggae one-two, but really loved drumming more and said he wanted to marry her which seemed a plausible version until the day she took him to the doctor for his cough and there in the waiting room he told her that he always thought the children of a blonde woman and a black man were the most beautiful so that she saw he lived in a saga with little to do with her and so returned to Connecticut where at the post office she kept getting letters saying I want to come, I really want to marry you but did not keep up correspondence because too easily she recognized the particular American fairy tale the drummer wanted to live. And when years later her children called to her from downstairs, in another story she probably failed to recognize, a heated moment of dissatisfaction, she came across these yearning letters nestled into the blue plush case with the guitar long since broken, the blue still so untouched and bright, something you might pet to see the fur angle to catch the light, and considered what yarn she might be able to spin for those children about the great and almighty Alhambra or the song of the gypsies but then realized, too, she had never once seen the Alhambra from the inside and anyway would whatever tale she might be able to summon ever count as anyone’s idea of a gift?
Six Poems
Eleni Sikelianos
I shall do nothing fancy
to make myself happy. Help!
I dwell here because I do not dwell
among the dead. But sunlight
is lethal to some
and to make themselves happy
they did things fancy like fashion
a goddess’s golden hair. Shall I
make a golden ring that replicates itself or build a golden
hour from which is banished grief to
make the hour so roundly happy? Some will bind
themselves in beautiful things and some
in chains to
make yourself happy. Some made a fetter from:
—the sound of a cat’s footfall
—the beard of a woman
—roots of a mountain
—sinews of a bear
—breath of a fish
—spittle of a bird
but what kind of beard?
Name your fetter name it Gleipnir
(a manacle as smooth and soft as a silken ribbon)
call it the wolf-joint or call it the wrist, it is
where the wolf or the world will bite.
(put your hand in its mouth as a pledge)
Now how will you settle an argument with only one hand?
wrist wreathe wrest writhe wr—to twist
the human mouth makes the movement-sounds
twisting out of the bindings
twisting away from how
make yourself happy moving
freely toward the experimental sky
and language the false start to love is
*
JUAN, JUAN ET SU FILS? said the dream.
Have a drink in the ancient Roman light which flares
on the strange American faces
on the airport train. Juan, Juan, my
countrymen and women, no offense but
how did you get so
fat
gray
badly cut
unread
small eyed
woolen
while I was away? I was gone and when I came back
you’d voted for the wrong politicians! So many men!
Had I slept for five minutes and found you
on the subway saying all the wrong things or
in the meadow to the starlings?
You’ll feel like the waist of an otter in the teeth of a tiger and wonder
how hell is dressed with poorly—
how it’s haunted by badly pissed-off persons or people
These people, for example, forgetting
to make themselves happy
built the entryway but forgot to build the building
used up all the wood & coal & sky & ice & light
Now ¿Donde viveremos?
*
ESSAY: HAPPY BRAIN
See the center flower
of the brain happy See it
sliced happy happy
hippocampus happy anterior cingulate cortex What
happens in a labyrinth happens
because the brain unspools its
stiffening threads like copper wires untightening from
the trouble spot happy nucleus accumbens happy insula
Dura mater, hard
mother, peel back to reveal
what without my fist in its mouth makes
the brain so happy A wolf
if sighted now would make
me happy [Her and the others of her kind … running in the whiteness
of that high world] but not when wolf
was like a well where we threw
ourselves in fear Sometimes still
fear struck (mountain lion when I walk ) (being eaten) (my amygdalae firing:
chaos war
the wheel-crushing
world or
the wa
y a word can hover in its surroundings between sense and sorrow
narrow sound shivering
as if the world itself rushed in decay toward that trembling
if the world could stabilize the word could or if the word no longer feeling
the world went mindblind Yet How sad a wieldy word
under dominion which is where we seem
so often to like it lick it
and it goes dry, a little button
of control pleasure happy
nipple-word made to militarize
My father kept pushing the lever, the
pleasure center lever, my brother
kept pushing the lever, my
friends was it
desire or pleasure
wanting or liking? Now
he’s dead, my
dad.
http://magazine.du.edu/academics-research/seeking-happiness-could-make-individuals-depressed-2/
Some women brought the domestic
into the poem like you would bring a blade of wheat to a field of grass It went
feral & changed it (the field) without
domesticating the field itself and
makes me crazy with happiness
Take this happiness test. Are you kind
to monkeys, to rats? Let’s slice some
to find out. The mind, said the Dalai Lama
is trouble.
Like when I was walking around the hills, and looked
into the big brown cow’s big eyes I thought
I was diving into a gentle loving pond on a
warm brown day. Then I was walking,
walking for hours looking, thinking
thinking STEAK. Not thinking
Happiness
Factors of No. 57. What makes a cow happy makes me
hungry. In the cabin, I kill
the fly.
“I’m happy I read this book!!” (Amazon review: The Science of Happiness)
the Hungarian professor with the unapproachable name says be in the flow or zone to
make you happy. You do this by concentration, with mirrors and music and maps. With no self-consciousness.
Do not think of the 43 million orphans in Africa, Syria, the 250,000 child soldiers
Do not not think
the what self in face of the other exchanges toward
pain (knowledge) &
pleasure (knowledge)
“climbing from the love of one person to the love of two”
and also shamelessly the accessible sky
forthright, untied
And a little ringlet at the back of the head can
elaborate
on a curve which pleases
the ear or the eye inside the
arc (the face) A straight line like
a horizon may also do it but
could terrify too. Could hurt
each tooth to the left when
facing the face. Earlier
I was feeling the hot sun on
my right hand while
driving it was
making myself happy—a pool of warmth in the webbing between thumb and index like a Bermuda of pleasure that spread to the whole machine—but
worried
about liver spots—as if
that organ could rise
to the surface
of the body and kiss
the world hello so
happily to see it
after too long in our
darks / out / our
depths
*
Test the “happiness factor” of any action
1. Intensity: How strong is the pleasure?
2. Duration: How long will the pleasure last?
3. Certainty or uncertainty: How likely or unlikely is it that the
pleasure will occur?
4. Propinquity or remoteness: How soon will the pleasure occur?
5. Fecundity: The probability that the action will be followed by
sensations of the same kind.
6. Purity: The probability that it will not be followed by sensations
of the opposite kind.
7. Extent: How many people will be affected?
How does this allow for lynching a man to make the crowd happy?
*
HOW HAPPY is the leaf, the
lamb the deaf
ear at the mirror
*
I WISH YOU a tidy sum of pleasures
say, the syllables of a wolf and their continentally changing vowel and stress; such treasures—
but how should we distribute them across the days?
as an army of armadillos tumbling
in sunlight ten thousand
happinesses pluraled up heaped and wait upon you the surplus
when the total of pain is subtracted from pleasure (Bain)
the wery hunter to fynd his happy prey OR Any happy concourse of Atoms
He … Weenes yet at last to make a happie hande By bloudie warre (Gascoigne)
in the felled light find you
the happy set of liberty, plenty, and letters (Middleton)
Hip me how. Harmony me
bouncing in the noontime
swoon
when sun
won
all we ever wanted to win honey
suspended in the aspirated day honey Have we achieved
the greatest happiness of the greatest number (Hutcheson)
the exultant position of the
Conjunctions 65: Sleights of Hand Page 24