good things will happen you're gonna get some


Barnaby Furnas, Deserter 2, 2003

Issues of Genius
-- by Tina Celona

She is competing in a race in which one runs across water in flippers, and sidestrokes with someone else holding on. She is the slowest. Afterwards one tries to buy supper but can only afford U-need-a Biscuits.

She is reading the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and learning about genius.

Every morning she gets up to see her husband off, then goes back to bed. She wakes up around lunchtime and eats. Then goes back to bed until dinner. Then goes back to bed.

Her friend writes to tell her that Nietszche said genius is a fiction forged by those who put it on a pedestal so they don’t have to measure themselves with it, and that she (her friend) has decided she does not believe in genius, nor is interested in the question of genius, that she has decided this recently, if not life would be unlivable.

Gertrude Stein has a thing for genius. She has met three geniuses in her lifetime: Alfred Whitehead, Pablo Picasso, and herself. That is pretty few!

Hidden Water
-- by Frank Stanford

A girl was in a wheelchair on her porch
And wasps were swarming in the cornice

She had just washed her hair
When she took it down she combed it

She could see
Just like I could

The one star under the rafter
Quivering like a knife in the creek

She was thin
And she made me think

Of music singing to itself
Like someone putting a dulcimer in a case

And walking off with a stranger
To lie down and drink in the dark

Salute
-- by James Schuyler

Past is past, and if one
remembers what one meant
to do and never did, is
not to have thought to do
enough? Like that gather-
ing of one each I
planned, to gather one
of each kind of clover,
daisy, paintbrush that
grew in that field
the cabin stood in and
study them one afternoon
before they wilted. Past
is past. I salute
that various field.