|
|
|
|
|
Joy Kaplan
Location: Osaka, Japan
Email: miss_kaplan@yahoo.com
Published in: Realpoetik, Gravityexcerpt from
The New York Boyfriends
13. please, keep the bra on!
From: al
re: white throated sparrows of the blood
sitting in the branches of your eye
conquered by the weight of birds
they twitter to you the blossoming
geometry of a map of stars
From: Benny
re: The New York Boyfriends-At Certain Moments He Achieved It.
She shook out her hair and laughed at me through it side long.
It may have been the moment that I fell for her. Dora was young
and very beautiful. Sixteen. I know. But with her it was different,
she was like some force of Nature, she induced in me the
simultaneous physical relaxation and mental arousal that are
pinot noir's hormonal signature. 'This '65 is still compact and tight,
but it already displays a ripe, plummy, clean and fresh nose.
Good aging potential, but also very drinkable now,' I thought.
From: Ray
re: she was like some force of Nature
You should try her now, dude, she's like some primordial event!
From: Benny
re: try her now
A rather unorthodox inclusion of 10% Cabernet Sauvignon gives this
otherwise classic Chianti a beautiful backbone. It carries wonderful
aromas of deep, mature fruit and intense spice. Dry and sophisticated.
It is an intense wine with luscious, refined flavors, that
reminds me of a Sassicaia '92 I once had: 'Huge and serious'.
From: Lily
re: Good aging potential
>I'm not gonna get all psycho-bitchy about how sexist that was...
From: Benny
re: Good aging potential
That you've mistaken it for incisive social commentary is truly a surprise indeed.
In the opening paragraph of the story containing the line which so distresses you,
I set the satirical tone for what was to follow by describing how I'd wrestled my
elderly grandmother to the floor and violated her open tracheotomy.
Um, this did not actually happen.
From: Dora
re: Sixteen.
I had none of his knowledge but all of his irony.
From: Benny
re: Sixteen.
She was a wisecracking hot-head, but basically a nice kid
and after a few sips of rag water, she'd let me pull the strings
and then things would get...embolismic. She was young
enough to look up to me and not see my faults.
At least for a few years.
From: Benjamin
re: At least for a few years.
All of this lasted a long time, or a short time: for properly speaking,
there is *no* time on earth for such things. (Zarathustra, 4th Part)
From: al
re: it may have been the moment
what was she wearing?
From: Benny
re: what was she wearing?
Not much. A black silk confection with a front hook
which I was able to activate with the tip of my cane.
It was good fun, that double jack-in-the-box,
but mastering the technique required practice.
I was Jackson Pollock executing a painting on porcelain.
From: al
re: jackson pollock
his work was marked
by bold lines and forms,
and it became progressively more colorful
as his style evolved.
From: Dora
re: painting on porcelain
Those sessions of Abstract Expressionism left little bruises between my ribs.
From: Ray
re: executing a painting
One has to commit a painting, said Degas, the way one commits a crime.
From: Benny
re: little bruises
But Dora was a good sport.
From: Charles
re: little bruises
We shape our tools, and then our tools shape us. (Neil Postman on McLuhan)
From: Benny
re: little bruises
Nostalgia for those splendid little purple mums inspired me, years later
while on business in Tokyo, to acquire a ruinously expensive Ming vase,
white porcelain featuring a motif of dime-sized blue chrysanthemums.
Place little good perfect things around you, O higher men!
Their golden ripeness heals the heart.
What is perfect teaches hope. (#15, On The Higher Man)
From: Dora
re: painting
My grandmother paints in oils. New England landscapes, you know the kind:
autumn birches on fire, snow-packed roads, cloud covered marshes, Rockport
Motif #1...
From: Lily
re: painting
>Some people don't paint because they weren't born with a paintbrush in
their hand.
From: Benjamin
re: ennobling privations
Others will just go out and buy a paint set. If they can
afford only one tube, then they'll paint everything in blue.
From: al
re: ennobling privations
but was picasso that impoverished?
perhaps he deliberately chose a limited color palette,
in the same way that a poet may contain himself
to a set of words, using them over and over again,
trying to exhaust all the possibilities.
From: Dora
re: trying to exhaust all the possibilities
Me? After the rain I tear off my clothes, jump into a puddle and rub mud all
over my body.
From: Benjamin
re: rub mud all over
I am *not* a canvas for other people to paint on!
From: Dora
re: ennobling privations
What kind of painter are you?
From: Israel
re: After the rain I tear off my clothes
What a minute, if you cover yourself in mud, that's *pottery*, isn't it?
Careful, you're not just mixing paint now, you're mixing metaphors!
From: Dora
re: mixing metaphors
And why not? Nowadays, they call it 'multi-media'.
From: Ken
re: mixing metaphors
Traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way the handprints of the
potter cling to the clay vessel.
(Walter Benjamin)
From: Ray
re: mixing metaphors
Cool. I'm down on the connection between Expressionism and Vandalism,
but this cane trick, man-it's amusing, I'll grant you that-but is it Art?
From: al
re: but is it art?
art never expresses anything but itself.
From: Benjamin
re: art never expresses anything but itself.
What a *wilde* thing to say!
I guess it's somewhat simplistic for me: it's art because it speaks to my
soul.
From: Israel
re: What was she wearing?
Was she barefoot?
From: Benny
re: barefoot
I really can't say. This was back in the days of ankle boots and leg warmers,
remember those? In any case, she didn't make much of an impression with her
clothes on because her mother sent her out into the world in ensembles that
did not show her...lungs to advantage.
The subtext of those princessy outfits was, 'This is gonna cost ya'!'
From: Ray
re: This is gonna cost ya'!
So *she's* the one who invented pay-per-view TV!
From: Benny
re: The New York Boyfriends-Pay-Per-View.
But when she undressed, sweet Jesus, she boxed my ears,
such a thunderstorm in my head, the tumult of fist fights
breaking out on Mount Olympus. I can still hear the cacophony
from the first time it happened, she stood there in front of me,
pensive nymphet in a hyperlady-like practised stance, scowling
and holding her poor cramp stricken tummy as if she would have
liked to disown it, her bijou breasts dangling like baroque pearl
earrings. I lifted her brassiere off the floor with the tip of my cane,
observing how it was lacy and frilly. 'Keep the bra on, Baby,
please, keep the bra on...'
'What I lack in tits,' she told me with the split-second
reflexes of a house-fly, 'I make up for with lace and frills.'
From: al
re: i lifted her brassiere
you take off on such a little strip, and there you are soaring!
From: Ray
re: i lifted her brassiere
We all come into this world the same way: naked, screaming, covered in blood.
But if you live your life right, that kind of fun doesn't have to end there.
From: Lily
re: sweet Jesus
>I thought you were Jewish!
From: Charles
re: sweet Jesus
There is no way of testing our beliefs against something that is not also a belief.
From: Benny
re: sweet Jesus
Just a manner of speaking, old girl.
The only deity I pay homage to is
Shploingy, Divinity of Stilettos.
From: Israel
re: Divinity of Stilettos.
Amen!
From: Ken
re: practised
Do you have your spell-checker on British?
From: Benny
re: practised
As a native speaker of English I am not dependent of spell-check
or any other such crutch. I subscribe to _The Economist_ and _The Granta_.
From: Lily
re: Divinity of Stilettos.
>Your shoe fetish brings to mind what the young Edmund Burke wrote in his
inquiry into
>our ideas of the beautiful 'I know nothing sublime which is not some
modification of power.'
From: Israel
re: shoe fetish
I'm so incredibly bored with sex. I don't want to hear about it ever
again.-Manolo Blahnik
From: Benny
re: The New York Boyfriends-Something Sublime.
My luck was such that no matter the date, each and every time I flew
her into Newark it was that time of the month. Personally, I couldn't
have been more delighted. I enjoy nothing more than a petulant red wine,
and Dora was a sassy Beaujolais nouveau.
Let's just say that I'm a lush.
Generally speaking, Dora was an enlightened young lady, however,
sexually she was in a dark age of superstition and taboo, but she was
educable and after enough hooch, she let me give her swimming lessons
with my tongue. Let's just say that while I frown upon crumbs left on the
sheets, I do not mind a lipstick mark left on a champagne flute.
From: Lily
re: Beaujolais nouveau
>I could throw up if it weren't for the effort it would take.
From: Benny
re: the effort it would take
The basic fact of the artist's existence remains that
no one asks you to do whatever it is that you do,
and just about no one cares once you've done it.
From: Israel
re: Let's just say that I'm a lush.
'All passions that allow themselves to be savored and digested
are only mediocre.'-Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), Essays
From: Benjamin
re: Let's just say that I'm a lush.
I've always been on the wagon, but in those days
it was a broken wagon hitched to a dead horse.
From: Dora
re: I could throw up
This is a revolution, dammit! We're going to have to offend SOMEbody!
-John Adams (MA) in 1776, The Musical
From: Charles
re: This is a revolution, dammit!
I don't know up to what point a writer can be revolutionary.
A writer works with language, which belongs to tradition.
From: Israel
re: This is a revolution, dammit!
Be not intimidated, therefore, by any terrors, from publishing with the utmost freedom
whatever can be warranted by the laws of your country, nor suffer yourselves to be
wheedled out of your liberty by any pretenses of politeness, delicacy, or decency.
These, as they are often used, are but three different names for hypocrisy, chicanery,
and cowardice.-John Adams
From: Ray
re: Beaujolais nouveau
Oh, man, that's twisted! That's High Goth! I absofuckinglutely like this guy.
A man who doesn't go down on his woman, whatever the weather, doesn't
deserve her!
From: Charles
re: Beaujolais nouveau
Here-here!
From Nabokov's _Pale Fire_(p 155 in the Commentary, in my edition)
Kinbote: You appreciate particularly the purple passages?
Shade: Yes, my dear Charles, I roll upon them as a grateful
mongrel on a spot of turf fouled by a Great Dane.
From: Israel
re: Beaujolais nouveau
Fi!
From: Benjamin
re: Beaujolais nouveau
Gosh, I'd blush, were I able to remember how...
From: Ray
re: Fi!
As in Fi, Fie, Fo, Fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman?
From: Benny
re: Fi!
Your best friend is probably inflatable.
From: Israel
re: Fi, Fie, Fo, Fum, I smell the blood
Let's just say that anthropophagi's not my cup of tea.
From: Ken
re: Fi!
Fi is simply the French equivalent of 'fie', as in 'Fie upon thee, whoreson wretch!'
From: Benjamin
re: Fi!
OED gives:
'an imitation of the sound instinctively made on perceiving a disagreeable smell' and:
'An exclamation expressing, in early use, disgust of indignant reproach. No longer
current in dignified language; said to children to excite shame for some unbecoming
action, and hence often used to express the humorous pretence of feeling 'shocked'.
From: Charles
re: the humorous pretence of feeling 'shocked''.
Whole worlds of moral insight and cultural history in that 'hence', eh?
From: Benjamin
re: Whole worlds of moral insight and cultural history
Lexicography is Godhead.
14.you're just something i used to fuck.
From: Dora
re: The New York Boyfriends-He Forbade Me To Leave The Apartment During The Day.Obediently, I reclined on his bed in the soft cocoon of his silky white
down comforter, which still held the shape of his body and his smell,
watching rhomboid patches of light in precise Bauhaus geometries
float across the apartment, Manhattan glistening in the distance.
From: Benny
re: watching rhomboid patches of light in precise Bauhaus geometries
It had been so long since she was properly rogered, she mused.
She looked at the clock. Six hours and counting.
From: Charles
re: watching rhomboid patches of light in precise Bauhaus geometries
A shadow is a two-dimensional object. Some information has been lost, some is retained.
From: Dora
re: The New York Boyfriends-Manhattan Glistening In The Distance.
At night he would take me to dinner there: The Tikka Grill,
where he would lecture me about the twelve tone scale of
classical Indian music, or whiskey sours at a Russian restaurant,
where he would let me have his cherry.
From: Benjamin
re: whiskey sours
Absinthe makes the tart grow fonder. (Ernest Dowson)
From: Charles
re: The Tikka Grill
Nobody goes to that restaurant anymore because it's too crowded. (Berra)
From: Benjamin
re: The Tikka Grill
Yogi spoke by twisted standards of grammar and rationality,
but I find his utterances somewhat charming.
From: Lily
re: At night he would take me to dinner there
>Sounds like he didn't nourish you so much as choke you.
From: Ray
re: let me have cherry
I'd like to come across such a dining companion!
From: al
re: he let me etc.
as soft and
surprising as
a baby's fist
opening.
you?
From: Dora
re: me?
The boy across the street. He used to wear a silver crucifix on a piece of raw hide.
He always had a pack of Winston's rolled up in his sleeve then. He's balding now,
thick in the jaw. He's quit smoking and put on some weight. Still has some acne
on his nose, though, like when we were kids. Last time I saw him he was wearing
gold chains on his neck and wrist, his butt crack hanging out between his Gulf War
commemorative T-shirt and his Levi's.
From: Ken
re: let me have cherry
It may interest you to know that although there are over one thousand species
of the tree indigenous to the islands, one seldom comes across a cherry in Japan.
From: Dora
re: The New York Boyfriends-The Chrysler Building
He showed me the Chrysler Building for the very first time.
From: Benjamin
re: The Chrysler Building
Swift-footed Hermes decided that this mortal girl should be
called Pandora because so many Olympians had given her gifts.
From: Dora
re: The New York Boyfriends-Pandora's Box.
I was too frail gaunt and small to make a sound or try to stop him when he did it. (Thomas Hardy)
From: Ken
re: when he did it.
Man is what has happened to him, what he has done. Other
things might have happened to him or have been done by him,
but what did in fact happen to him and was done by him,
this constitutes a relentless trajectory of experiences
that he carries on his back as the vagabond his bundle of
all he possesses.
-Jose Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955), History as a System
From: al
re: when he did it.
one of those nights
when things could have
gone either way.
From: Ray
re: when he did it.
Rumors abound about what set that night in motion-love triangles, revenge,
a mob-style debt collection.
From: Charles
re: what set that night in motion
Reality is usually less baroque.
From: Lily
re: when he did it
>Did *what* exactly?
From: Charles
re: when he did it
When I speak or write of myself, I try to tell what happened:
yet I know, as all must, that memory itself is a creative organ.
From: Benjamin
re: when he did it
Let's leave aside the more gothic possibilities!
From: Israel
re: when he did it
It is an error to create a first-person narrator with the clarity and control of a third person.
From: Benny
re: when he did it
I never saw her again.
From: Ray
re: when he did it
Kids are funny. You have to watch what you're doing.
(Holden Caulfield)
From: Dora
re: I never saw him again.
Until I saw him again at a party. He smashed me a pelvis-grinding hug which was not accidental.
From: Ray
re: which was not accidental
I mean how can you tell about that stuff for sure? You can't.
(Ibid.)
From: Benny
re: which was not accidental
The message was, 'You're just something I used to fuck.'
From: Dora
re: The New York Boyfriends-The Message.
The world loses nothing if I am ruined. Is that what you mean to say to me?
It is interesting some of the time to live. I feel alive.
I know I have no protector and that I am a woods of his nocturnal hunting.
I know that I mostly do not know what is in the woods-even if the woods is me.
(Harold Brodkey)
15.crime saved my fucking life.
From: Benjamin
re: The world loses nothing if I am ruined.
She said, full of genuine anguish.
From: Lily
re: The world loses nothing if I am ruined.
>Such moments of acute unease deserve to be recorded,
>because they rarely find their way into the history books.
From: Benny
re: The world loses nothing if I am ruined.
It takes a steady hand to write about baby-eating, even briefly.
From: Israel
re: baby-eating
Jonathan Swift devoted a long pamphlet to the subjct in 1729,
but then he was satirinzing the English moneyed classes, who would,
it was implied, swallow anything providing it smacked of good financial
sense.
From: Ray
re: The world loses nothing if I am ruined.
Reminds me of a Khmer Rouge slogan, 'To lose you is no loss.'
which reminds me of a Dead Kennedy's tune, 'Holiday in Cambodia'!
From: al
re: nocturnal hunting.
eros is solar and nocturnal: everyone is aware of him, but few see him.
From: Benjamin
re: eros is solar and nocturnal
The twofold aspect of Eros, light and dark,
crystallizes in an image repeated a thousand
times by the poets of the Greek anthology:
the lamp in the darkness of the bedroom.
(Octavio Paz)
From: al
re: nocturnal hunting
where are you?
From: Dora
re: nocturnal hunting
Where do you want me to be?
From: al
re: nocturnal hunting
somewhere in the moment real.
or at least nearby,
so i can scent you out.
From: Charles
re: Where do you want me to be?
Media allow a kind of virtual presence
that is bi-directional and only otherwise
possible through imagination.
From: al
re: a kind of virtual presence that is bi-directional
i'm connected right now to everyone who is reading this-more connected,
probably, than if we were in the same room. yet, i take the appearance of my
aloneness as the deeper reality, imagine myself cut off, isolated. it's true that
i'm alone only if i ignore all the other people in all the other rooms, just
because i can't see them, hear them, touch then. connectedness is a fact I deny
with the ideology of my loneliness.
From: Dora
re: scent you out
That smell is gardenia, (she says offering the inside of her wrist), like it?
I am living in tomorrow but how I long for yesterday.
From: al
re: scent you out
(yeah.)
dora. is that your real name?
From: Dora
re: real name
No, Al. I made up Dora Schutz because I thought it sounded glamorous and sophisticated.
My mother gave me one of those chirpy-sounding 1950's names, a slave name, if you will.
From: al
re: a slave
i take it you're flung into the future
in japan, workin' for the man.
From: Dora
re: The Man
More like The Big Scary Monster.
From: al
re: the big scary monster
monster?
From: Dora
re: monster?
Godzilla.
I work for a conglomerate which owns the studio that produced those films.
(I am considering toiling under a slightly less mind-numbingly fascist regime.)
From: Ray
re: a slightly less mind-numbingly fascist regime
You mean like a restaurant kitchen? Dora, you think you're working?
That's not work! You're not sweating, and your blood isn't dripping.
You're getting sugar blown up your ass!
From: al
re: godzilla.
have been trying to figure out your address.
what is crzd.jp.org?
From: Ray
re: Godzilla.
Godzilla is known in virtually every
country and every language pronounces
Godzilla a bit differently. Kind of like
Buddha, Moses, or Jesus.
From: Dora
re: what is crzd.jp.org?
Actually, the j stands for Jewish-I am, parenthetically, Jewish.-and the p stands
for poets. We are a cell of counter-revolutionary zaftig Jewish dwarves who write
haiku in our spare time.
From: al
re: zaftig jewish dwarves
zaftig?
From: Dora
re: zaftig?
Yeah, zaftig. Careful, Al, your goy is showing.
It means fat-in-all-the-right-places and did I forget to mention
that I suffer from a persistent nervous cough, a false appendicitis,
a limp, and periodic loss of voice; I'm single-breasted, left-handed,
bow-legged, knock-kneed, cross-eyed, have 11 toes, a hare-lip,
a cow-lick, an over-bite, a blue spot on my tail-bone, and inverted nipples?
I think I'd be quite attractive really, if it weren't for this skin condition...
From: al
re: zaftig
top heavy.
bottom sweet.
salt.
From: Dora
re: salt
Alchemist! You boil me down with sentences so bare, they seem to mean...everything.
From: al
re: work for a conglomerate
what do you do when you aren't consorting with criminals wanted worldwide?
From: Dora
re: what do you do?
I conglom. You?
From: Ray
re: criminals wanted worldwide
Crime saved my fucking life.
From: Lily
re: criminals wanted worldwide
>Since I deplore scandal I shall not notify the police.
From: Benjamin
re: criminals wanted worldwide
A criminal career is a career like any other. (Walter Benjamin)
From: al
re: me?
i read messages in the rocks and surround myself with these old guys,
and i have to fix 'em up and make 'em look pretty, clear the cobwebs away,
so that when visitors come and walk the corridors they know i'm takin'
good care of their heritage.
From: Dora
re: old guys
Gerontologist?
From: al
re: gerontologist?
something like that.
i work in a little place
called the smithsonian,
maybe you've heard of it?
i commute to our twelve acre farm in virginia.
you?
From: Dora
re: me?
Virginia? I was supposed to attend a big family reunion
down DelMarVa way last year, but Da Monsta wouldn't release me.
I ride my bicycle.
It is really wet around here, so I have a clip on the handle bars
for an umbrella. The bicycle is silver and the umbrella is red.
From: Benjamin
re: the umbrella is red
The rain it falls alike
Upon the just and unjust fella
But more, I think, upon the just,
For the unjust's stolen the just's umbrella.
From: Ray
re: the umbrella is red
If I were one of those frou-frou drinks with the little umbrellas
at that Polynesian place on Route 1 in Saugus,
I'd be The Kamikaze.
What kind of frou-frou drink are you?
From: Dora
re: the umbrella is red
Today I passed a roadside shrine of about thirty jizu, these baby-sized statues
that commemorate miscarriages and abortions. They were set in three rows,
on tiers like a chorus of stones. Granite so worn down as to make their little
faces almost featureless.
The statues were covered with splotches of lichen, pale green in color, as if they
had been tie-dyed to match the stand of bamboo growing behind them. Bamboo
is bright green in spring but in fall, bamboo does not have that pigment, what's
it called? My husband would know, he's a real City Boy, but a botanizer from the
asphalt. It doesn't turn an amazing shade of red like Japanese maple, but bamboo
fades in autumn.
Every time the rain sweeps down the colors grow brighter: the gray stone, the tired
bamboo, the little clusters of lichen the same color I see now as I look down at the
veins on the tops of my hands as I...write this and some Japanese genius, probably
a grandmother, had set offerings of flowers, pale lavender mums in ten vases before
the front row of jizu-san.
From: al
re: every time the rain sweeps down
such cascades of beauty!
From: Dora
re: every time the rain sweeps down
Raining out like every spark in the universe has crashed down
on the lone tree outside your bedroom window and there you
are checking your e-mail and the slant rain coming, again and again,
the thunderstorms and how it is cloudy all of the time, at dawn and
at sunset when the sky is aglow it is like living inside a giant pearl,
the Rorschach clouds forever tumbling in hypnagogic sequence overhead.
From: al
re: every time the rain sweeps down
it's raining marvelous encounters of my life
-apollinaire, "calligrammes" (1918)
From: Charles
re: checking your e-mail
We have some paradigmatic ways to transmit information:
0. speech,
1. writing,
2. printed words,
3. printed letters,
4. Morse code,
5. a sequence of zeros and ones.
We have standard ways to convert speech to writing and to print.
Something is lost with each conversion: tone of voice, "hand",-but we
are (for now) thinking of information as something that *need not* be
lost in the conversion.
From: al
re: the lone tree
sometimes i cannot tell
which are the thoughts
and which are the trees.
From: Dora
re: thoughts
It is so wet around here, perpetual raindrops make Japan a museum of green:
rice paddies tucked between the buildings, raindrops making little circles on
their surface, a rice paddy is a green game of ring toss, little poisoned ponds
everywhere lousy with algae and choked with water lily and lotus leaves and
wherever civilization has not encroached is overgrown with vines and mosses.
A new flower comes into bloom every week in this country and these days
I look at it all and wonder, searching for that exact shade of green: You.
From: al
re: it is so wet around here
except for temperature and humidity
we know little
beyond our imagination
of you me and this...
From: Charles
re: we know little
There is a question that all lovers ask each other, and in it the erotic
mystery is epitomized: Who are you?
From: Ken
re: There is a question
A question without an answer...
From: Dora
re: of you me and this...
This congenial sushi place.
Outside, a display of fruit and flowers. Persimmons and pomegranates in capsicum colors.
Yellow orchids and white chrysanthemums (flowers, Al, as big as your head) inhabiting
an unglazed bizenware vase along side tall sinuous dark branches bearing magenta berries.
Inside, a counter made of a single plank of hinoki wood, unstained.
I could not resist stroking the grain with my hand.
The little waitress was wearing a pink and gray kimono,
maple leaves scattered all over her body as breakably slender as a wand.
When she called out my order, the four men working the sushi bar
all turned and gave me a knowing smile.
From: al
re: the little waitress was wearing
you?
From: Dora
re: wearing
A long skirt, color of fresh split wood, scratchy fabric slit up the side to the knee.
An off-white shirt with little wooden buttons.
No collar.
Sleeves pushed up.
Your basic Hanes.
Blonde hair gathered at the back of the neck.
No jewelry.
Gardenia perfume.
From: Benny
re: Your basic Hanes.
What? No brassiere?
From: Dora
re: no bra
Sorry, Benny, I gave up on all that long ago.
From: Benny
re: I gave up on all that long ago.
Poor deformed creature.
From: al
re: gardenia perfume
some good bread, well buttered
cinnamon-sugar on top...and something else!
toast it.
From: Dora
re: gardenia perfume
Smell of gardenia something like that.
From: al
re: gardenia perfume
spicy, warm, luscious.
From: Israel
re: a counter made of a single plank of hinoki wood
Did you sit at the bar, or on tatami?
From: Dora
re: a counter made of a single plank of hinoki wood
At the bar so that I would not have to bother with my shoes:
Dark brown leather sandals, rounded at the toe like baby shoes,
a strap around the ankle and a little brass buckle,
the kind of shoes that Bulgarian school girls wear.
I hadn't enjoyed such height in weeks and the sushi bar seemed
a good perch from which to see if anything resembling a pattern
or a story was discernible in its tumble of places and event.
Not much, not yet.
From: Charles
re: Not much, not yet.
Journeys hardly ever disclose their true meaning until after-and sometimes
years after-they are over.
From: Israel
re: a little brass buckle
It was always such little details, rather than her lofty ideas, which went
straight to my heart.
From: Charles
re: lofty ideas
Opinions are the least important aspect of a writer.
From: al
re: wearing
austere aphrodite!
what did you order?
From: Dora
re: what did you order?
Oysters on the half shell, a small brown gourd shaped ceramic tumbler
of sake served in a little white cup decorated with tiny blue cranes.
This one sushi guy had a huge round head with ears like urn handles,
a real Buddha. He stood by in his short white happi coat, blue sash around
his thick waist, hands on hips, nodding and smiling approvingly, as if to say,
I love to watch you eat!
From: al
re: when she called out my order
i'm jealous.
From: Dora
re: jealous
Of me?
From: al
re: jealous
no.
From: Dora
re: jealous
Of the Buddha? Because he gets to watch?
From: al
re: jealous
no.
From: Dora
re: jealous
Of the sushi bar? Because its wood got stroked?
From: al
re: jealous
no.
From: Dora
re: jealous
Of the little waitress?
From: al
re: jealous
yes.
From: Dora
re: jealous
Because you too have always wanted to wear a pink silk gown?
From: al
re: jealous
no.
because she got to take your order.