HOW TO MAKE A CANOE/KAYAK TRAILER

Physical.

Artist.

Hemingway strolls into wars and rides water buffalo. Not to mention marriage (s), a very taxing activity. Very. Agatha Christie takes long, long constitutionals, for weeks. Where is she? Books sell. Murder. Rolf Jacobsen sculpts pillowcases, and sometimes, well, he was wrong. I once preferred two pillows, now one is OK. I hate the short pour and also when politicians breathe out their eyeballs. Twain shoots small pistols at large, water rats (Coypu?), rats scurrying in canals like the shadows of a seesaw. But why? Elvis knows three types of karate, as does Elizabeth Bishop,

who often forgot it was Sunday, liquor stores closed, so more than once drank cologne.

William Stafford practices slight-of-hand magic, daily (we saw him working K’s wedding), as does Jimmy Chen and we all know Murakami likes to run and run and run, slowly. Sort of a shuffle. OK, a jog. He jogs, his mind swirling with tunnels and shopping cats.

In fact, this is a town of cats. When the sun starts to go down, many cats come trooping across the bridge—cats of all different kinds and colors. They are much larger than ordinary cats, but they are still cats. The young man is shocked by this sight. He rushes into the bell tower in the center of town and climbs to the top to hide. The cats go about their business, raising the shop shutters or seating themselves at their desks to start their day’s work. Soon, more cats come, crossing the bridge into town like the others. They enter the shops to buy things or go to the town hall to handle administrative matters or eat a meal at the hotel restaurant or drink beer at the tavern and sing lively cat songs. Because cats can see in the dark, they need almost no lights, but that particular night the glow of the full moon floods the town, enabling the young man to see every detail from his perch in the bell tower. When dawn approaches, the cats finish their work, close up the shops, and swarm back across the bridge.

I don’t like when people call runners joggers. Though running does jog the brain.

Curtis Smith with a running flash here.

Tennis star Andy Murray, on literature: “I don’t read, I haven’t read a book since the second Harry Potter.”

Thanks, Andy.

Robert Frost likes to shake sadness from the fingers of ferns on the forest floor. Galway Kinnell sings, badly. Blake Butler walks on treadmills as he reads his yearly 120 + books. Jan Follain stuffs dead animal eye sockets with marbles. Tomas Transtromer has a cooler name than you and argues in one poem that writing stimulates a bunch of cells at the base of the brain (the reticular activating system [RAS]) and so on/so on and there are a lot of tiny frogs climbing up the outside of my house, a lot of tiny, green frogs, not really sure why, but if I was Gary Snyder I’d insert the frogs into one of those Robin poems. The frog is a device of nostalgia, etc. Also the shack. I keep seeing Gary Snyder building a deck or walking on top my roof, not sure why, all back-lit by the moon. Tu Fu competitively eats cheeseburgers and TN Williams likes to swim. A few weeks ago, I perchanced a boat trailer:

A TAXIDERMIST
—Jean Follain

A taxidermist is sitting
before the russet breasts
green and purple wings
of his song-birds
dreaming about his lover
with a body so different
yet so close sometimes
to the body of the birds
that it seemed to him
very strange
in its curves and its volumes
in its colors and its finery
and its shades…

16 foot, purchased off Craig’s List. Dude’s name was Larry. He was out front, installing a homemade outhouse on a pontoon boat. Welding. Clever.

Me: How fixed are you on your price? You take 400?

Larry: Well, I can’t give it away. I could do 425.

Larry shows me how to hook it up to car. Explains pins, chains, lights. Later:

Larry: You don’t have a plate. Take the back roads home. (Inferring to avoid police)

Larry: You can pinch your fingers off (this about hitch).

Larry: You know to take wide turns, right?

Larry: I can give you a way home you’ll see no one.

Larry: You ever driven a trailer?

Me: No.

Larry: Well, some people drive a trailer and they forget the trailer is back there. Don’t do that.

So I hit a curb or something but get home and start making the boat trailer into a canoe/kayak trailer.

HOW TO MAKE A CANOE/KAYAK TRAILER

1. Align the bumpers. Use a hammer or a minimum wage banana. Measure once, cut twice.

2. Give the bow tops solitude. Herd the sheep. Don’t feel bad: sheep enjoy being herded. Cup holders?

3. Feed the winch coffee. (No more than 12)

4. Buy some swim noodles from the lower 48 and smoke them. Punch them full of cloves and feel like you’re back in college.

5. Axles, springs, and U-bolts optional. A U bolt is a bolt in the shape of U. Wish life was more often that way.

6. Get two buckets and make it look like Alabama. Make it a Hank song.

7. Lick the extended tongue.

8. Add a beer cooler. Two? OK.

You are dung. I mean dun. I mean done.

Well, afterwards go fishing:

A glow interview with Kathy Fish about flash fiction.

She discusses why she writes flash.

3 Flash I admire today!

The Washingtaco became a lunch staple: a crisp one-dollar bill folded longwise and stuffed with quarters.

A.R. LaRoche discusses money here. I like the rising action, the turn, the conceptual nature, the logic, the cleverness, the way money is our bodies and our bodies money.

There is the voice of God in the bass reverb and the lyrics’ rising incantation.

Claire Rudy Foster and PUNK. I like the voice, the address–persona to auditor–the energy is glow, the energy, control of time, lots of waving and jumping and hands up like you just don’t care. It captures something.

Interview.

Below the hills a white egret will spin across the green marsh flats, bursting in my vision like a firework in the night; and I will be sure that the blue has never been so bright and low, the whole weight of the sky hanging just over our heads as if we are children beneath a parachute. My son tells me, “There is no present, Daddy.

Steven Church with what lyricism can do…such control, and an exquisite mix of image and reflection. The controlling fog metaphor feels very authentic. Life, the gray area between of what we know and do not know at all, what we have and wish for, what we understand and all the rest. Fog.

Church interview.

Pro tennis player, Stan Wawrinka: “I don’t like to read books.”

Thanks, Stan.

No glow to you.

And so on.