04.27.04 - 9:09 a.m.

The plant service is killing my plants. One would think that a plant service would be able to keep my fabulous porthos, which I've had for years and which was huge and lush, which I'd propagated successfully alive, but apparently not. I think that they barely water things because they don't want to have to go get more water for them. This is very frustrating to me, since I'm not sure what else I can do and have too many other things on my mind at the moment to worry too much about it. I think, though, that I'll have a plant weekend this summer and go and take cuttings of my mom's houseplants, repot my spider plant and my ivy and my orchids, and the like. I don't have time for it, at the moment.

I would love to get a really enormous jade plant, one old enough that the soft green stems have become woody and the plant has taken on an architectural quality. My grandmother's (and by extension, my great-great Uncle Harry's) Christmas cactus is like that: lush and woody and sculptural in feel.

NPR has fund-raising this week, so I am reduced to listening to the collection of CDs I have at work. I suppose I could listen to commercial radio, but that would really suck. So, at the moment, Wilco and Billy Bragg singing "Feed of Man," a fragmentary lyric of Woody Guthrie's, to which they wrote music. And good music, too, it has a good driving underrhythm and fine twang. The lyrics were not written in stanzas, but it's easier to read in stanzas, so:

If you Beat up butcher and You bleed a man:
If you bang up and badger and Bloodlet a man;
And then I come along on the feet of man
And half way laff and cry �bout the meat of man

And I do what I can to bale string and tie some ballad truths
Up cured out for the feed of man

And folks try to tell me that it�s on god�s orders
That you bleed your man;
It�s on god�s good word that you bleed your man;
On god�s plan print that you dead a man;
Or you spit and curse and whip your man;

I say I�ll help you fix and
Squeeze yourself up a new kind of a god
Of some kind; One that tells you
Fertilyze and multyply;
One that Tells you:
Outsow and outblow
Outplant and outgrow;
Outdoand outrun and outclimb and out spread
Every other tree and bush
And brushy fruits and flower petalls;
Out fruit them all
For the feed of man;
Out stalk and out hunt and out think
For god�s own sweet sakeout think! out think!
Outthink the fruits
Outgrow these animal kind and shapes of man!

It you miss and go down
Your dust will turn up on that long hot job
Once more again
To help in the feeding and the seed of man
And not in the bleeding and the end of man.

Yeah, there's a good bit there that's perfectly referential and that catches you when you hear it while not thinking. Reading it, you can catch the gist too, but it's particularly effective as a song, much more so than as some written document. Songs have different logics, different languages, and things that sound trite when spoken take on a different tenor when wailed, sung, or sobbed.

I also really like the song "Stetson Kennedy" (We're gonna dump Mathers-DuPont in the salty-sea.

Le sigh. And now, I'm listening to Remember the Mountain Bed, which is wholly different than either of the other songs. I've probably ranted about it before, and I suspect I will repeat myself and rant about it again in the future. It works as poetry, as much as it works as a song, and the lazy guitar, the almost spoken-song are again perfect for the lyrics. I'm listening to it again and again and it makes me want to cry. It's a spring-in-autumn song, if any of that makes sense, a late-summer song, but a wise one: it's not about ripeness, but the strength of beginnings seen through the lens of history. And, well, it's definitely about sex, but not in any un-wholesome or unnatural way. It's not I-want-your-body sex, it's just... well, so many things. Lovely:

Do you still sing of the mountain bed we made of limbs and leaves:
Do you still sigh there near the sky where the holly berry bleeds:
You laughed as I covered you over with leaves, face, breast, hips and thighs,
You smiled when I said the leaves were just the color of your eyes.

Rosin smells and turpentine smells from eucalyptus and pine
Bitter tastes of twigs we chewed where tangled woodvines twine
Trees held us in on all four sides so thick we could not see
I could not see any wrong in you, and you saw none in me.

Your arm was brown against the ground, your cheeks part of the sky,
As your fingers played with grassy moss, and limber did you lie:
Your stomach moved beneath your shirt and your knees were in the air
Your feet played games with mountain roots as you lay thinking there.

Below us the trees grew clumps of trees, raised families of trees, and they
As proud as we tossed their heads in the wind and flung good seeds away:
The sun was hot and the sun was bright down in the valley below
Where people starved and hungry for life so empty come and go.

There in the shade and hid from the sun we freed our minds and learned
Our greatest reason for being here, our bodies moved and burned
There on our mountain bed of leaves we learned life�s reason why
The people laugh and love and dream, they fight, they hate to die.

The smell of your hair I know is still there, if most of our leaves are blown,
Our words still ring in the brush and the trees where singing seeds are sown
Your shape and form is dim, but plain, there on our mountain bed
I see my life was brightest where you laughed and laid your head...

I learned the reason why man must work and how to dream big dreams,
To conquer time and space and fight the rivers and the seas
I stand here filled with my emptiness now and look at city and land
And I know why farms and cities are built by hot, warm, nervous hands.

I crossed many states just to stand here now, my face all hot with tears,
I crossed city, and valley, desert, and stream, to bring my body here:
My history and future blaze bright in me and all my joy and pain
Go through my head on our mountain bed where I smell your hair again.

All this day long I linger here and on in through the night
My greeds, desires, my cravings, hopes, my dreams inside me fight:
My loneliness healed, my emptiness filled, I walk above all pain
Back to the breasts of my woman and child to scatter my seeds again.