entering a bridge planks to(o) many

All of two mountainsides

First well traversed pagoda resting

Old Korean men walk behind

with hands behind

tiny roses or knots folding against spines

Young Korean men walk aside

hold her purses her bags her hands

Young bench

Strange intercom

Wherever flurries of English, I assume too much

mainly I am being addressed am I being addressed

May I ask where you are from?

There is a beautiful bridge there

Ye, audah yo

I give my mashi toaster to a friend

She tells me about the mountain behind blueville

You climb it and there is the ghost town beyond, you can see it

A wall you cannot scale, a mountain you can climb

But both were hills

Iron nickel bridge, metallic music notes and flower buds welded on

To go over in poppy light some transfusion

Duck under the bridge and meet the red dirt roots, I swear I know myself better in this place

A farm plot protected by one stuffed animal giraffe

Makeshift irrigation for deadened corn crops and rice paddy fields

becoming swampland becoming

Red earth

To make use of the war

Old barrack gardens

A minefield where whole families travel

To make use of the war

A mindfield of barbed wire tied into asterisk risk

Vines sent to coil around new life but the wire remains to remember

Make use of war

And white gloves abound up and down the path

What I imagined was queen anne's lace, picked and fingered

For my grandmother

She will never see such a field and dreams of traveling in it her whole life

Who cares for a failing grandfather

His eyesight passed,

his mind will not let him

breathes

remember my mother or his wife

To make use of a war

His tight embraces are my closest to knowing

She calls to speak with someone normal

and could I take her up the mountainside in my mind?

entering to be festive all

April 12, 2007

I find it is the starlet bell blossoming at the end of the stem and not the head of another person that presents the greatest challenge for me

How say that body language of any car approaching

should I not use the competitive nature of my students to gain their engagement?

I avoid the post office

It is not the language collision I fear but perhaps what really wants to be said between us is the true barrier and we want to say it without words, I mean sounds,

I want to say you white lotus lily atop branchlet
When my eyes first stuck against you the unfettered wick has now split open into onion

How say that capturing of growth?

Yellow powder dust my bare feet
They glide with ease over warming floorboards

It is not the language derision I fear but the absence for want of discovery of barriers

How say that body language of Namdaemun open market laughter

In your tiny patch grassland forest somehow you rebloom after one fall


lotus lilly rising


Sungnyemun gate

White boats floating atop
enduring blades of grass

Japanese cherry trees (Yoshino Cherry slightly fragrant with pink or white flowers---Akebono Cherry soft pink single flowers---Sargent Cherry rich, polished reddish bar---Accolade Cherry semi double petals with a deep rose pink bud opening to blush pink---Mt. Fuji Cherry large white blossoms covering widely spreading branches---Okame Cherry pink, single flowers and fine fall foliage---Rosy Cloud Cherry large double blossoms that are deep pink color---Weeping Cherry dramatic boughs drape to the ground---Autumn Flowering Cherry semi double (10 petal) pink flowers, nearly an inch in diameter---Usuzumi Cherry grown from propogations taken from the 1,400 year-old "usuzumi" tree growing in the village of Neo in Gifu Prefecture, Japan) , meet the Korean Sakura cherry tree

entering karen teacher

karen teacher, i think recommend means to commit yourself

karen teacher, i aviation to my mom for help

karen teacher, my mother knows the meaning of altitude

karen teacher, i deceived a big prize from the teacher because i helped her from getting in a accident

karen teacher, i deceived that boy by leading him to the haunted house when i said i would take him to his mom

karen teacher, i want to chase the fish very much

karen teacher, a kitten eat a mouses

karen teacher, a pronoun is what it is because it was born that way

karen teacher, joy is a baby kangaroo

karen teacher, i was very careful at bear



dear sue, i love that you sneak little stickers on my arm and purr about it all class

dear brian k., thank you for moonwalking back to your chair

dear 2nd graders, thank you to whoever left the blue marble with the white ribbon running across it on the podium. dynamic korea and i stole that marble with ease

dear woo-young, you are quite possibly the funniest student i have, especially when you playfully complain about things like the tip of a marker being furry from use. you say, "i do not like the fur"

dear sung-hee, stop tattle-telling on other students; seriously, it's annoying

dear yeong-sip, your fellow students would like you to stop expectorating when you speak; one student circled the spit on his desk from across the room

dear daniel, thank you for asking me what my position was on the usefulness of locating the object of the prepositional phrase

dear albert, you described yourself as looking like a mouse; you are very mousey when it comes to doing work, but sickeningly cute

dear 1st graders, i had so much fun making origami frogs with you even though you fought over which piece of green paper you wanted

entering first being ill, so i'll

but basho under that loose post cooling clothing behind a closed door
intuition, intonation --> icelander, ilsander leads to lander Kadio clock,
Korean K is to K, A is to A, R is to R, E is to E, N is to N.
i fit inside of Korea with open spare, with an O to spare
You mentioned gertrude stein in my dream with the time,
but to awaken it was me walking to early morning classes we teach. i always cross through diagonally the playground of dry sand and then muddy puddles in the middle with elementary schools looking down upon

education everywhere
A boy passes me with a breaded meat-sicle in the shape of a bear.

I add in, the loud speaker enters, the night and mansion of books; there was a kind of car accident in our dream; we spoke about it.

I believe an awning is san d bagged

Hangeul

Am I, will I hide within?

thought of hannah weiner this morning but only because i came upon
her
i think it's lightly raining, no the plumbing is warming
indians
and there is a little girl of 7 or 8 who is hannah choi and she is very serious just like me.
i want her to know
why does that small dog whine so,
it is considered affectionate-like when koreans whine just enough
that it is okay to be serious and open-eared


Close, near associations in symbol or character
Who is writing in Korea right now?

He said, "poverty's child" or he began such a haiku

my body, limbs so sore, full of pending rest, those kids just run around full of little viruses almost conditioned to being in a constant ring of sickness they are comfortable with coughing, sneezing directly before your face- a sign of hello-ness, a sign of respect, certainly as it shows their harmonious states, and to share, i should be so lucky, right? and so, now i am.

and poverty's child
i am obsessed with buying spinich yo-gee-a-o;
give me strength to love my sickness, come into one step of knowing myself better through it, that i am absence of place without my body.
a woman in leg braces goes up steps into a back alley hospital today
she might have stood next to me and taken in my breath, just to feel that same leg soreness i felt, feel reverberating throughout not only that part of my body, but everywhere
nose wipe
i am balanced in my body still, my illness harmoniously distributed like little leaflets


we become poverty's child when we pay too much mind to our mind

and the rest, perhaps said in restfulness (at least by these hands and eyes):

"he starts to grind the rice,
and gazes at the moon"

live the body, live for my body,
pet that dog which whimpers, eat several more squares of dark chocolate,
modor ges soyo everything,
delight in my bruised eyelids,
taste and spit unpasterized seoul milk,
get lost, get nowhere in all your many laboring hands.

Still a mythic creature in my slowness, unknowing, and undoing
the sunlight was delivered backwards and we know there was no need to name the polluted fog that on a colder night might have been trusted to the onslought of snow clouds
now in our lungs
time-nose-run-drip

Some Solnit snippings walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together,

; the mind wanders from plans to recollections to observations.
of rhythm of thinking, Or perhaps walking should be called movement, not travel, : it is both means and end, travel and destination.
Fear has created a whole style of architecture , where to be a pedestrian is to be under suspicion We fear open public space . When you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back; . Exploring the world is one of the best ways of exploring the mind, and walking travels both terrains.

But philosophers who thought about walking are rarer. The philosopher was a nobler profession than the physician was; today, they are, and must be the poet combined. As a philosopher by profession, one was an unsettled thinker in a settled place. Give your mind to walking. Physicians were members of a secret guild of travelers, wanderers, gypsies during Aristotle's time.
William Carlos Williams was both a wanderer as a physician and a poet.
What strange descent of alliteration,
philosopher, physician, poet

entering first awakening

March 24

A few patterings of kids run past my apartment building. I stare at the back of my W15000 alarm clock. The neon lights of Korean bbqs, mini-marts and buffets are out. A car goes down teh alley every now and then with a loud speaker and a man shouting something in Korean over and over again; it begins to sound like a song; it begins to sound militaristic; it begins to sound like a song. The walls are paper and papery thin; I can hear everything; I can staple posters directly into the walls they are so thin. Yet it is warm and comfortable; I am taken care of here. I think it rained earlier before I forced my mind to to sleep on into the noon-o'-clock hour. I am still jetlagged and need to turn my internal clock around. Still in defense-mode, my body and mind take turns being in mild shock, although I can never really feel the caliber of this shock; a defense to my defense. Perhaps my shock isn't panic-stricken shock though, perhaps I am getting more comfortable with myself, with the uncertain--with what I can bring myself to do and be challenged by, and what I cannot do at the present moment. I will consider walking to Lake Park today--how far is it again? I will buy more water, rice and vegetables, or rather, I will buy bi-bim-bap-- sa k'sayo and trot on home. I have much to read and type up for my job on Monday. I have the means to feel unalone, legs to walk it through, fingers to dial numbers and type letters and write letters. This time could be a reminder for me to look at communication again in all its new forms--its abundance-- here, I learn to hold my breath under water and still manage to breathe.

entering what I speak

March 23

I begin to speak green tea bread.
I begin to speak barley tea.
I begin to speak hello in Korean convincingly on the telephone to awoman who dials a wrong number. She is equally convinced I must know more Korean.
I begin to speak "yong-al-dur, ha sha sui snika?" "Annew, ha-jee-man adul-tile hash she neyo." "Annew, tile buteho." "!#$%&??..." "Modor ges soyo." "Ah, cho seminda." Click.
I begin to speak a translation of what I just said to the wrong number caller. Even to stay inside, full of jetlag, sleepiness, minus the 7++ cups of green barley tea and packets of instant kopee (coffee) with varying levels of sugar (yes, one can choose) printed on teh package, I am called.
I speak a call to the call of Ilsanders by showering in my Korean bathhouse, an absence of bathtub.
I begin to speak to soju na mekchu-yo, though I haven't yet tasted either yo-gee,
I begin to speak yougurt box drinks
I begin to speak bottled water to conserve, to avoid hard chemicals in the tap, today it is Jeju, San Da Song,
I begin to speak Korean television commercials that break into the very domestic and traditional and metro-sexy,
I begin to speak the option of having your noodles scissored for you,
I begin to speak my shoes off in my aprtment,
I begin to speak of 5am awakenings,
I begin to speak fo my hello kitty alarm clock that is blue,
I begin to speak the Koreapolyschool language,
I begin to speak my Korean students' rhythm and behavior, one tells me that: "If you eat a flower your stomach will hurt, but then you will grow strong; my mom said so--for real!"
I begin to speak it is not a foreign place. I find myself split second wishing it more foreign for me, but it is quick and fleeting. I will find it very foreign in my loneliness soon enough. I must eat more than fruit for dinner. I must find a new friend to eat out with as is the Korean social custom. Wanted: You teach me Korean, I teach you English and we take each other out for kimchi and soju,
I speak of enjoying the morning calm,
I speak of the onslaught of the cherry blossom festival,
I begin to speak what I do not know.
I enter foreigner slowly.

entering the first day of spring

March 20th

What falls away for me is partly conscious, of necessity, and partly unseen. That is, there are things I am shedding right at this very moment which must go their way. This must be why I never remember to use a camera, a thought which is contingent upon the next, what does it mean to record a memory? How to be like William Carlos Williams here. I am not overwhelmed by emotions right now, but patient, calm inside of them. I beg of myself to let me inhabit my experience. Slowness, says Hejinian, is the key to all. How my mind flutters to any open page right now, what strange new survival. I feel more absent and lonely outside the camera in those prolonged seconds before the finger errs in its search for the button, before the needling flash, as we, I, reduced to a subject, an object, am conditioned, am coaxed into a suspended existence for "just a little bit longer" as I "hold it", and therefore, hold myself. It is necessary to continually fall away, how else have I have here? Fold. Open.