Dale Lans

[dalelans]

Take the data at full strength and refuse the inferences that would domesticate it.

[dalelans]

I see in the corner of my eye, a little blonde girl trying to do a handstand in the grass, but actually she is a labradoodle taking a shit

[dalelans]

The corn maiden

Sealed in a brown wax paper packet coated in synthetic butter spread coming from the fields of Iowa where once the sorrowful farmer dreamed of the preacher’s daughter dropping her handmade dress in the fields at dusk but now are only tilled by mechanical hulks, painted red and green, steel and gasoline, smelling of debt. Your humble origins in the heart of Mexico, where alchemical attention turned a grass into grain-states, into the slavery of abundance, into stone temples painted with blood, where the shreds of the victim’s ghosts get sewn into a gown for you to wear in the underworld. It must have rained there in the midwest, because you are not completely desiccated, little golden kernels, decayed little baby teeth. I used to think you were so boring as I would drive my car across Pennsylvania through the fields of your endless brothers and sisters, past your solemn orders, where you worshipped the sun. But I am sure there is a drop of water in you because when my daughter puts you in the carousel of our microwave, shining weird light in that humming disco, the water boils and you explode, ballistic bloom, snapdragonlike and percussive, so we can dump you into a plastic tub and watch a movie on TV. Eugene

[dalelans]

I am always approaching the sacred sideways, suspicious of my own reverence. I want to love the mystery but I don’t want to be a solemn idiot about it. My family is all asleep, but here I am downstairs. I take snarky gulps of the mother dao and sing happy birthday to an ant in the kitchen. Eugene

[dalelans]

Whales

What I miss about california is the whales. I still dream sometimes about being beside a body of water and the back of one surfaces like a shiny black island and then descends, leaving only ripples. I even sometimes expect to see them in these east coast marshes and rivers, the hope becoming expectation.

Eugene

[dalelans]

Shit floats in America.

[dalelans]

Logos 2

It is as though someone were reading a book and when their eyes see us in the words we are alive, but only then. Eugene

[dalelans]

Logos 1

When you write it is better if it’s not you writing. As if you have thrown a curtain over yourself so that the dimmer thing quietly sparking beyond you can be reflected clearly. It is better if you just set out like a pilgrim into language to find a place that rings and weeps light. It is better to come back as a witness, with directions that anyone can follow if they are silent and receptive to magic.

Eugene

[dalelans]

As a father you sometimes become a father to all, as when you are sitting in Trenton Transit Center, and the homeless are shuffling with their carts, trying to occupy this warm and well-lit place, and the affluent folks roll their bags, clicking their clean new shoes on linoleum, taking the eastern corridor to New York city, and everyone else, the workers in fluorescent vests, listening to the robot voice announce the outgoing train, in sweatpants and boots, all together they transform into babies again and the transit center itself becomes a nursery in a maternity ward. You see their soft skin and big new eyes and the tiny sounds they make. And you know your own babies are somewhere in that vast room but being honest to yourself, you realize they are indistinguishable from all the rest, and so from panic to resolve you say ‘I will take them all home with me and we will be a happy family’

Eugene

[dalelans]

’Agonies are one of my change of garments. I do not ask the the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person’ - Whitman

[dalelans]

To be sitting with you at the restaurant, at eye level, not moving around doing things, but simply together.

[dalelans]

Carve me a lion out of stone Line the picket fence with planter boxes full of begonias so red you think they’re plastic Til you look at them sun-bathed and see they’re more alive than you. Make me a labyrinth in the garden from short evergreen hedges. In the center let more peonies grow than anyone could need.

[dalelans]

its like chewing on an apple at an archery range - ryan davis & the roadhouse band

[dalelans]

racoon on the canal path dead, curled up as if sleeping, must have been hit by a car and then, in wordless shock, crawled over to this soft grass to rest.

gaping hole in a poplar the dead wood mulched by rain and time clovers growing in it. Spring flowers everywhere, roses and clematis and fleabane, and it is impossible to know if they have been sown by a person or an animal or the wind.

[dalelans]

a true pessimist can’t love god. if you trust god you will trust other people. if you trust other people you would trust god. is there any other way?

[dalelans]

Dopamine

When a thing wants something, that, to me, is a being. and it takes so little for some material process to want something. They all do: the rain wants the ground, the protein wants to fold, the demons want worship. It hard to find a thing that is not drenched and entranced with want. maybe all metaphors that last long enough become literal.

Eugene

[dalelans]

Snowdrops just blooming in March, Little bells, drooping like lampshades from their scapes, Petals white as the clear moon, white as bone, white as snow of course, Rising and falling from dark green leaves. Each bunch is a family of nuns, hopeful but somber. They shoot up along the creek’s edge, the first green things to reclaim this land and start the cycle of life and death again.

Eugene