Neighbors

1. The skulls of men are several microns thicker than those of women, as are their bones.

2. They are at essence inverted birds, dense, flightless and clumsy.

3. We could wink at the stupidity and brutality of the object. It is separated from love, and the pains of conjunction. It grasps itself, but slowly.

4. Into the surge of the sea on the rocks, the lizards rush headlong.

5. The clothes are gone at this time of night; there is no material for us to touch. We hope to kill our neighbor, marry his son, eat his cattle, drink his blood, and vomit in the bed of his parents. But we realize only vectors, and are unable to fix any point, only continuous points.

6. Our neighbor's tomato grows on its vine. It has no understanding of any one thing surrounding it, yet it moves into space freely, feelingly. Our neighbor plucks the fruit, moistens his lips and empties his bowels. To his mind, his force is not abstract, or deferential, but open and secure. Our neighbor pictures his daughter, and knows, from this picture, that he possesses her.

8. Our neighbor opens his cupboard, finding it much as he expected it.

from "On the Road to What We're Tempted to Call Heaven" by Bernadette Mayer

I'm not being bitten
by heaven or by hell by god
but by the no-god's rain on the world
that my friends the moths hate
& so they stay away
old poets
so few & far between
leave so soon as visitors
without waiting for either the rain
or most of the fun
I go up to my room
if I have one
assuming the feel or sound of the rain
could be heaven
as if there was one
but I'd rather wonder how come
no such perfection
or knowledge of everything
from the beginning of the day
or the beginning of history
or the histories of everyone
beginning to end
or no end could be

DFW

"What looks like the cage's exit is actually the bars of the cage" 222

"The encaged and suicidal" 224

"Dealers, sirens of the other, second cage" 224

"Joelle's been in a cage since Y.T.S.D.B." 227

"Set free the encaged rapacious thing inside" 229

"The difference between suicide and homicide consisting [...] in where you think you discern the cage's door" 230

"The blind god of all doorless cages" 231

"[Cocaine] had been not just her encaging god, but her lover" 235

"A foreign academic with an almost Franciscan bald spot has the swirling limp of someone with a prosthesis" 229

Mother-death-cosmology 230

Entropy: fans - 233 "everything falls off the wall sooner or later" 235

"Putting ? after THE END" 235

"Entertainment is blind" 237

"These are facts. This room in this apartment is the sum of very many specific facts and ideas. There is nothing more to it than that" 239 (Wittgenstein)

"The Prize" 239

Iona 273

Morris Code 275

Individual v. Group 82-83

Without a thought 27, 44

- from index to Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace. I'm stunned at the sudden loss of this fiercely intelligent and laceratingly funny writer.

from "The School of the Dead" by Helene Cixous

Writing is this complex activity, "this learning to die," that is, not to kill, knowing there is death, not denying it and not proclaiming it...Our crime isn't what we think, it isn't the crime in the newspapers, it's always a bit less and a bit more. In life, as soon as I say my, as soon as I say my daughter, my brother, I am verging on a form of murder, as soon as I forget to unceasingly recognize the other's difference. You may come to know your son, your sister, your daughter well after thirty, forty, or fifty years of life, and yet during those thirty or forty years you haven't known this person who was so close. You kept him or her in the realm of the dead. And the other way around. Then the one who dies kills and the one who doesn't die when the other dies kills as well. Surviving is not what we think...

Field

What was it now? History was a black glass. Time was a black glass. The island was curved, the hand was curved, the middle wasn’t there anymore.

The Kling lobby

If you can imagine a tone, vibrating at a particular rate. This tone spread from the lips of one boy, a solar systemic dust-bunny, settling into the air, freely absorbing every particle caught in the summer sunlight.

The city is vast, and threatens to overwhelm this tone, although it also vibrates in response to it. We won’t call these vibrations harmonies, for that would be too easy a description. No, we will call them sympathetic, although they are, by their nature, ambivalent. Being vibrations, they have, for the longest time, stood outside of the political process.

The city balanced on the edge of vast abyss that stretched over a black lake. So that the buildings of the city, many of which were cloud-shrouded, would not topple into the lake, every building was tethered to the ground with strong cables made of steel. We entered the Kling lobby as it was being destroyed by the tone. Having known of its onset for quite some time (years, in fact), we were surprised only by its forceful insistence. Frankly, we blew it off for a while. And then we were worried; could feel our cells shift, a micron, a pixel, an electron displacement.

The Kling lobby is a series of planes and fabrics. The fabrics include velvets, and others, more space-age and cleanly. The fabrics shuffle against our skin, sloughing off dead cells. The cells collect, shed moisture, consider, then reconsider themselves as mite-food, and squirm at the very thought of it. In short: utter consumption. Instantaneous.

The glass in the Kling lobby is vibrating so as to be invisible.
The structural supports crumbling.
Survival!
Limited from dust clouds.
Overheard against the open mouths: “Cover your eyes!”

Now here’s a funny story; you’ll laugh at this: The body swung itself over the stairwell, swollen to twice its original size. Fat cells reproduced until skin split. Arms growing out of the end places - punctuation. No preciousness here, just survival. The waxed floors shone, and our shoe leather couldn’t get a grip. Abrupt floor covered in something, and then, the usual: bright light, white-flash-what-have-you.

A cashless, armless people move through the streets. The snow falls, like always, on the armed and the armless. The people join in harmonies.

"A fat photograph..." by John Wilkinson.

A fat photograph

about to be cropped


where what is incidental

bloats an incident


with light or dead space

The elements

will say Ah

drawn close


the moles & needles

drill unpractised flesh


She dies less

for points of their


invention, solid caps

over points of entry


than a quick–to–the–jaw

reasonableness


without waste or

overlapping


idly ripping

incidental blossom
off

-from Proud Flesh.

At a loss

Now,
if only he placed his thumb
salted or
part-knurled
on newsprint next to my ear
I could ink it.

Fight

MK Ultra and MK Olsen circle each other warily, sweat beading on the dry parts of their skin, but not on the elbows, which remain dry, and are not formerly dry.

Further excursions

My loves,

This excursion into what they are calling quiet space has been unlike others.  The air was duller, maybe the grafts have flattened, the mountains are no longer the kind of music I had grown used to hearing. There are too many folds, and some are blaming the hypoxia in the oceans on demons; I can't help but think of the stupidity of our own recent demonology. I suppose these sort of stratifications are inevitable. I am unable to write much more at this time; both of you should take care not to mention any of this to R_______.  He has his ears to the speaker, but is unable to graft from there to there.

Yours,

H.

Habilitation

My Dear Fortune,

I have thought of writing to you for some time now.  The evenings on the island have been humid and unpleasant; the curvature of the earth here is such that I have felt like nothing more than a tuning fork for suffering. The only news I have received from the mirrore realm was a very desperate letter from your dear father, and there were no details, only that you were up to your neck in politics, or at least its consequences.  

I hoped to avoid the conventional lines, but it seems that those suspect words are all that I have with which to write. Not to evince melodrama, in these crystalline times, but I am very upset by your, and Ljuba's, behavior, that you haven't found time to write a line since our meeting in Vienna. I know, my attitude towards life is increasingly petit-bourgeois, but with that dreadful scare still in my bones, I wonder if it wouldn't have happened had you written. I shall return to the sanatorium this eve, and am hoping against hope that you will be able to join me again. There is a village nearby where the fever has not yet touched; it is no floating-world, but will do for the moment.

Under some duress from the assembled martyrs, I have begun writing again, starting with a portrait of Max Weber (you know his achievements in some forms of quiet space travel). I think often of our past together, your image a song, the grain of your voice with me late in the night. My exile to these hotels and swamps has led me to further consider the difference between the concepts Gelten and Sollen (there may in fact be some useful gesture there). Although, as you know, perhaps better than I, we are each no Leo Naphta, caught deep inside magic mountain.

Although I don't wish to keep you from your studies, please let me know if you have thoughts on the colloquium. P____ has expressed his distaste for my politics, but then again, he was the first to decry quiet space, and that has gotten our cause nowhere. Don't forget about the machines, or the sites of prophecy! Without maintenance they, also, will be lost. Be secure in your feelings towards E_____. Her love affair with that musician is imminent. The three of us are living together, although with physical proximity comes inner separation; the only real solution seems to be a friendly parting after the war. I am suddenly aware of every fold in my skeleton; my own capacity for balance seems to be growing.

I affectionately embrace you.

Until then,

H.

Haiku 18

- From 'Mostly Sitting Haiku," Allen Ginsberg.

0 to 9

-Sunrise, a song of two humans. F.W. Murnau. 1927.


Midsummer mix here.

/moonpatrol/tetine/ellen allien/gui boratto/zoo brazil
/butch & amir/traffickers/rhythm & sound/the field
/djosos krost/the presets/m83/apparat

How much it matters?

|___this much and no more___|

Six Lines

In late capitalism

guilt becomes technology.

Technology agrees with hunger.

Desire is part of being drawn.

Being is difficult to tell.

Speaking is compared to seeing.

Pastoral reprise

The hills were alive with music,
but more like living
with singing.
In the sense of:
that hand is a particle,
this, a
mechanical sound, almost,
but hollow.
In the sense of:
turtles
Being emptied from their shells.
Into the soup
was the rule.

God, he says, we've filled our hills
with this shit.

That's not polite, she returns,
scratching her shoulder against the bark.
Which, then,
unsuprisingly,
fell to the dirt.
That's just not polite.

I can remember discussing Engels,
and certain utopian metaphysicians,
but that was always
beside the point.
Hills, meadows, the like,
were beside the point.

The point was to think like rats.

Not hum
Beethoven.

She gestures:
I like that one that ends with cannons.

At hospital

Bones are unlike other
Bones, less rigid, perhaps.

I watched the others unfold
their vacation stiffness through the
tram station gates.

It only occurred to a
grasshopper (i thought)
to fly through
that brittle crowd,
checking each point
for mass and temperature.

Some anxieties about evolution

This morning, while showering, I noticed a single scale on my leg. It was iridescent, primarily on the green end of the spectrum, and pulled at my skin as I inserted a fingernail under its edge. I bent over, water forced my eyes shut; I could still make out the flashing scale behind my closed lids. A little breathless, I reached to turn the water off, blinking at the sudden brightness.

Psychological State

"There are no psychological states." Her voice drifted out over the crowd, her eyes edged with red effort. "What can you assume from language gifts? Our electrons are charged - that has to be enough." Her arm raised for emphasis, she noticed the frayed end of her suit jacket. Funny to have not noticed this before, she thought, her lips suddenly dry. At that moment in Oklahoma, two young girls were shot in the head, and left at the side of the road, their hair laced with dust. Early the next morning, the sun showed no signs of accelerating its pace, as if acknowledging an impossibility. Thinking - that sounds too much like a poem - her old worries returned, and she erased the line.

Quality of Life Czar

b:
how is it?


a:
quality of life index: magenta
happiness index: attachment to existence
banana index: several
sunglasses index: grey gradient
science fiction index: stalker
secondary science fiction index: solaris
name of g_d index: eight
parasite index: vigorous protozoa

Political pictorialism

Cats' looks are often
in the direction of mice,
it's said.
This transposition -
some brain-stem hope for blood -
fails as a measure of desire,
as cats are equally moved by the sudden
slope or the still pulse of grass,
simply put, for rolling,
or licking underneath a tail.

Why argue for slaughter, then;
there is no ancient marble of,
say, Democritus or some other
molecular heir,
that has not given way to
gentle haemorrhage,
rapid or not.

Civilizations 2

Civilization

Those are the people who do complicated things.

they'll grab us by the thousands
and put us to work.

World's going to hell, with all these
villages and trails.
Wild duck flocks aren't
what they used to be.
Aurochs grow rare.

Fetch me my feathers and amber

*

A small cricket
on the typescript page of
"Kyoto born in spring song"
grooms himself
in time with The Well-Tempered Clavier.
I quit typing and watch him through a glass.
How well articulated! How neat!

Nobody understands the ANIMAL KINGDOM.

*

When creeks are full
The poems flow
When creeks are down
We heap stones.

-Gary Snyder

Things occur naturally

Today
Water spouted
Out a water spout.
I was going to
write something about
how it happened,

but decided
against it.

Civilizations 1

To account for Life is one thing: to explain Life another. In the first we are supposed to state something prior (if not in time, yet in the order of Nature) to the thing accounted for, as the ground or cause of that thing, or as its suffient cause....To account for a thing is to see into the principle of its possibility, and from that principle to evolve its being. Thus the mathematician demonstrates the truths of geometry by constructing them....

To explain a power, on the other hand, is (the power itself being assumed, though not comprehended) to unfold or spread it out.
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, from Theory of Life.

Suprematist Poem #1

Against recent claims,
There is no world of words laid bare,
Strung across ours.
With that out: There is only room for
hands against the bow;
No nocturne or granular state for this ship.
As after beaches,
Soles could push sand into carpet rows,
Almost quickening steps.

William Blake - The Clod and the Pebble

The Clod & the Pebble

Love seeketh not Itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care;
But for another gives its ease,
And builds a Heaven in Hells despair.

So sang a little Clod of Clay,
Trodden with the cattles feet:
But a Pebble of the brook,
Warbled out these metres meet.

Love seeketh only Self to please,
To bind another to Its delight:
Joys in anothers loss of ease,
And builds a Hell in Heavens despite.

Some raised thing

Rudolf Stingel, "Untitled (After Sam)," oil on canvas, 2005 - 2006

I know, this thing is not the most current thing. I feel that I should raise this thing, because, once this is raised, it will change other things. I can point it in the direction of things, and it will change things. It is some light cruelty, knit together as we are.

Deserted Islands

...To that question so dear to the old explorers- "which creatures live on deserted islands?"- one could only answer:  human beings live there already, but uncommon humans, they are absolutely separate, absolute creators, in short, an Idea of humanity, a prototype, a man who would almost be a god, a woman who would be a goddess, a great Amnesiac, a pure Artist, a consciousness of Earth and Ocean, an enormous hurricane, a beautiful witch, a statue from the Easter Islands.  There you have a human being who precedes itself.  Such a creature on a deserted island would be the deserted island itself, insofar as it imagines and reflects itself in the first movement....

From Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953-1974 by Gilles Deleuze.

Isidore Isou 1

MANIFESTO OF LETTERIST POETRY
A Commonplaces about Words

Pathetic I The flourishing of bursts of energy dies beyond us.
All delirium is expansive.
All impulses escape stereotyping.
Still I An intimate experience maintains curious specifics.
Pathetic II Discharges are transmitted by notions.
What a difference between our fluctuations and the
brutality of words.
Transitions always arise between feeling and
speech.

Still II The word is the first stereotype.
Pathetic III What a difference between the organism and the sources.
Notions - what an inherited dictionary. Tarzan learns
in his father's book to call tigers cats.
Naming the Unknown by the Forever.
Still III The translated word does not express.
Pathetic IV The rigidity of forms impedes their transmission.
These words are so heavy that the flow fails to carry
them. Temperaments die before arriving at the goal
(firing blanks).

No word is capable of carrying the impulses one wants to send with it.

From Introduction à une Nouvelle Poésie et une Nouvelle Musique. Paris: Gallimard, 1947.

Arthur C. Clarke 1918-2008

The ultraintelligent machines will certainly make possible new forms of art, and far more elaborate developments of the old ones, by introducing the dimensions of time and probability....The insertion of an intelligent machine into the loop between a work of art and the person appreciating it opens up some fascinating possiblitles. It would allow feedback in both directions; by this I mean that the viewer would react to the work of art; then the work would react to the viewer's reactions, then....and so on, for as many stages as was felt desirable. This sort of to-and-fro process is already hinted at, in a very crude way, with today's primitive "teaching machines"; and those modern novelists who deliberately scramble thier text are perhaps also groping in this direction. A dramatic work of the future, reproduced by an intelligent machine sensitive to the varying emotional states of the audience, would never have the same form, or even the same plotline, twice in succession.

What sort of art intelligent machines would create for their own amusement, and whether we would be able to appreciate it, are questions that can hardly be answered today. The painters of the Lascaux Caves could not have imageined (though they would have enjoyed) the scores of art forms that have been invented in the twenty thousand years since they created their masterpieces. Though in some respects we can do no better, we can do much more - more than any Paleolithic Picasso could possibly have dreamed. And our machines may begin to build on the foundations we have laid.

Yet perhaps not. it has often been suggested that art is a compensation for the deficiencies of the real world; as our knowledge, our power, and above all our maturity increase, we will have less and less need for it. If this is true, the ultraintelligent machines would have no use for it at all.

-From Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds!: Collected Essays, 1934-1998.

Frustrum.

Gary Hill. Flap flap.

Singing Sailors

I've found alot to admire in Mark Manders' work, a witty and Peircean approach to object-making. Maybe because I've been planning a trip to islands, and most islands make me think of skull island (energetically littered with masts, mutants and cannibals), but this drawing 'singing sailors' (1998) seems more exuberant sea shanty than exhausted allegory. [www.markmanders.org]

Jesper Just video

from My LIfe - Lyn Heijinian

Back and backward, why, wide and wider. Such that art is inseparable from the search for reality. The continent is greater than the content. A river nets the peninsula. The garden rooster goes through the goldenrod. I watched a robin worming its way on the ridge, time on the uneven light ledge. There as in that's their truck there. Where it rested in the weather there it rusted. As one would say, my friends, meaning no possession, and don't harm my trees. Marigolds, nasturtiums, snapdragons, sweet William, forget-me-nots, replaced by chard, tomatoes, lettuce, garlic, peas, beans, carrots, radishes--but marigolds. The hum hurts. Still, I felt intuitively that this which was incomprehensible was expectant, increasing, was good. The greatest thrill was to be the one to "tell." All rivers' left banks remind me of Paris, not to see or sit upon but to hear spoken of. Cheese makes one thirsty but onions make a worse thirst. The Spanish make a little question frame. In the case, propped on a stand so as to beckon, was the hairy finger of St. Cecilia, covered with rings. The old dress is worn out, torn up, dumped. Erasures could not serve better authenticity. The years pass, years in which, I take it, events were not lacking. There are more colors in the great rose window of Chartres than in the rose. Beside a body, not a piece, of water. Serpentine is fool's jade. It is on a dressed stone. The previousness of plants in prior color--no dream can come up to the original, which in the common daylight is voluminous. Yet he insisted that his life had been full of happy chance, that he was luck's child. As a matter-of fact, quite the obverse. After a 9-to-5 job he got to just go home. Do you have a compulsion to work and then did you have a good time. Now it is one o'clock on the dot, but that is only a coincidence and it has a bad name. Patriots drive larger cars. At the time the perpetual Latin of love kept things hidden. We might be late to the movies but always early for the kids. The women at the parents' meeting must wear rings, for continuity. More sheep than sleep. Paul was telling me a plot which involved time travel, I asked, "How do they go into the future?" and he answered, "What do you mean?--they wait and the future comes to them--of course!" so the problem was going into the past. I think my interests are much broader than those of people who have been saying the same thing for eight years, or so he said. Has the baby enough teeth for an apple. Juggle, jungle, chuckle. The hummingbird, for all we know, may be singing all day long. We had been in France where every word really was a bird, a thing singing. I laugh as if my pots were clean. The apple in the pie is the pie. An extremely pleasant and often comic satisfaction comes from conjunction, the fit, say, of comprehension in a reader's mind to content in a writer's work. But not bitter.

Civilized panic

The less subjects live anymore, the more abrupt, frightening, the death. In that the latter literally transforms the former into a thing, it makes them aware of their permanent death, of reification, of the form of their relations, which they are partly culpable of. The civilized integration of death, without power over it and ridiculous before it, which it covers up cosmetically, is the reaction-formation to something social [Gesellschaftliche], the awkward attempt of exchange-society to plug the last holes still left open by the world of commodities. Death and history, particularly the collective one of the category of the individual [Individuum], form a constellation. If the individual, Hamlet, once deduced its absolute essentiality out of the dawning consciousness of the irrevocability of death, then the downfall of the individual brings down the entire construction of bourgeois existence along with it. What is annihilated in itself and perhaps also for itself is something nugatory. Hence the constant panic in the sight of death. It is no longer to be placated except through its repression.

-Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics.

On Belief

The impasse which Leibniz tried to solve by way of introducing the notion of the "preestablished harmony" between the monads, guaranteed by God Himself, the supreme, all-encompassing monad, repeats itself today, in the guise of the problem of communication: how does each of us know that he or she is in touch with the "real other" behind the screen, not only with spectral simulacra?" - Slavoj Zizek, On Belief.

The answer, of course, is that it doesn't matter, as spectral simulacra is like a ghostly bread pudding, satisfying without the carbohydrates.

Vertiginousness - Theodor Adorno

A dialectics no longer "glued" to identity will provoke either the charge that it is bottomless - one that ye shall know by its fascist fruits - or the objection that it is dizzying. In great modern poetry, vertigo has been a central feeling since Baudelaire; the anachronistic suggestion often made to philosophy is that it must have no part in any such thing. Philosophy is cautioned to speak to the point; Karl Kraus had to learn that no matter how precisely each line of his expressed his meaning, a materialized consciousness would lament that this very precision was making its head swim. A usage of current opinion makes such complaints comprehensible. We like to present alternatives to choose from, to be marked True or False. The decisions of a bureaucracy are frequently reduced to Yes or No answers to drafts submitted to it; the bureaucratic way of thinking has become the secret model for a thought allegedly still free. But the responsibility of philosophical thought in its essential situations is not to play this game...
- from Negative Dialectics.

Homosexuality and Marxism - Jack Spicer

There should be no rules for this but it should be
simultaneous if at all.
Homosexuality is essentially being alone. Which is
a fight against the capitalist bosses who do not want
us to be alone. Alone we are dangerous.
Our dissatisfaction could ruin America. Our love
could ruin the universe if we let it.
If we let our love flower into the true revolution
we will be swamped with offers for beds.

-Jack Spicer, from Three Marxist Essays.

The Revision by Diane Williams

You should not read this. It is too private. It is the most serious. It is even too serious for me. I should make a something of this.

Here is the best part, when he said to me come here. That was the very best part of my life so far. In the doorway to his bathroom was where I was. It was where I was when I asked him, “Are you peeing?”

He said, “No, but now I am.” He was seated to do the peeing, so it would not be any problem to do it, facing me. I didn’t even hear it, the peeing, if he peed.

Well, why?–why can’t all of it be dirty parts, every part a dirty part, or quickly leading to another dirty part? –the part when he just put himself into my mouth?–or the part when he said you looked–I can’t remember how he said I looked to him, with that part of him in my mouth, but he jiggled on my jaw. He said open up before he went ahead and he peed.

Oh! That’s how babies could be made!

-Diane Williams

Robbe-Grillet is not napping

Alain Robbe-Grillet died today. "L'annee Derniere a Marienbad", which he wrote and Alain Resnais directed, has scenes where large reddish shapes appear.

Further Color Notes

Further Color Notes

Pg. 5, should be lighter red in circle and more orange in curtains
Pg. 8, lighter and brighter overall
Pg. 9, too dark, lighter, more orange
Pg. 12, move up image so more of red bottom line shows
Pg. 13, Blake's babe, lighter red around the snake
Pg. 14, include more of the snake at bottom, try not to cut off image
Pg. 18, flowers should be more orange
Pg. 20, red should be more orange
Pg. 21, rainbow should have a lighter orange band
Pg. 25, cross should be lighter, more orange in background behind heart shape
Pg. 32, brighter fluorescent orange
Pg. 33, brighter orange line from one bird to other bird, brighter yellow
Pg. 34, brighter pinks and yellows
Pg. 35, brighter yellow around cloud
Pg. 37, orange line around type box
Pg. 38, lighter if possible overall

-Charles Bernstein

Saint, Seizure

St. Valentine and epileptic (St. Valentine’s Church in Vilnöss, South Tyrol, around 1500).


He shifted his other hand on to the inside of the thigh, until the shaking stopped. You, comma, under, comma, shiver. Unseen by both, the thick skin draped across. Oh, right: The skins were white, and white. Surprise collected in puddles. His eyes scanned greenishly out over a humid jungle. The light filtering through the slatted blinds formed narrow bars on the floor. The floor formed narrow floors.

Brain Tapes

A line from a joke I forgot to write down and have now dismembered.

|
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The line above is rotating on its axis at a speed of one revolution each day.


Douglas Huebler
1970

Rocks

A small garden, a stiletto in the heart, a steel box, and some rocks.

The Fatalist

Dog isn’t right, poetry isn’t wrong — words in themselves
can’t be right or wrong. If writing is to serve as their chief
interrogator it must ask the very questions
regarding puppets or cookies that we would ask
with a three year old dashing toward us
with confidence. We would have to be armed
with questions and the artistic courage
that is required to sustain them. Then things will surface
like the scraps of paper on which they are written and ambition
afloat on mineral water left over from the party – we all remember
the preparations before and the cleanup after the fire. Brown by day
and red at night, the sky came within 500 yards of the conscripted
convicts. We gave them everything they asked for when they approached
the fire through miles of brush in prison garb
and guarded by deputies thinking us naive to be grateful for something
they’d been condemned to do. Things weren’t yet working
but I knew how to fix the problem. It was structural
as when I was in high school sitting in the town cemetery
which lay pretty much midway between the sentimental verses
on the gravestones and my fear of death. Figures distinct
from reality (which wouldn’t have suited adolescent girls)
hover over courage like the ibis. They sneer
and we thank them — as we must
since one of them lay the cosmic egg that contained the bird of light
that we now use to search for better spacing, wanting the sense
of suspense, of preparation and promise, the sense of things
underway, which means we have to get our indentations
right. But as you see, they might as well be in Florida — the same time zone
as yours — like manuscripts suddenly appearing on the horizon
in a box of loose pages they are still a long ways off.

-Lyn Hejinian, from "The Fatalist"