Chardin's Pleasure

The pleasure I get from a painting by Jean-Baptiste Chardin is the pleasure in experiencing an isolated moment in time Chardin’s pleasure was so intense it overflowed in smooth strokes unraveled expanded we see a knife jutting out from under golden slices of lemon we see life we see death we see unpredictable configurations teeter and dangle we see a cat walk over a clutter of oyster shells.

Think of a fugue in E minor think of the sound of a mockingbird a bed of peonies by the railroad tracks in Grand Forks, North Dakota. There is a glory in museums but there is also glory in the shine of water if the river moves we move with the river.

My water is hot I like it that way when I shower otherwise I prefer it pounded into money.

I have a tendency to circulate to mix to mingle take for example a skate cut open revealing its vast and delicate architecture red blood blue nerves white muscles you see these creatures lying on the sand a lot and wonder how they got there did they just die a normal death a death of old age or some other sickness and then the gulls got to it and pecked it open to reveal the marvel of its organs the things that made it live and eat and move and reproduce.

I feel the sigh of electricity in cathedrals, mountains, waves. I feel the pursuit of metamorphosis is pure mint a shoal in the river in constant reformation I like making scribbles because the lines one way or another evolve a meaning evolve a meaningful form the mind cannot but help but make meaning out of the most chaotic phenomena this is how we expand by talking and not saying what we intended to say but saying something different and surprising ourselves. Character, life, emotion are ghosts of intention. An intention is anything it is like shaving in the wilderness why would you want to shave in the wilderness but you do you do it to preserve a certain sense of oneself and so it makes sense like walking into heaven with a jar of screws.

The intent is to engage oneself with the world which is to say toss yourself into it pump it up kick it out it’s natural to feel that life is but a joke yes it is but it’s funny it’s tragic and funny simultaneously and sometimes creating something is a burst of ecstasy.

Gas station at midnight bell rings the mechanic is boxing a skull.

Meaning is achieved by image: insects smashed on a windshield. This is what acceleration does it topples it collides it smashes it creates it empties the mind of disorder it is a sudden clarity iron hammered into fiction glint of a silver coin on a wrinkled palm.

Look at the bitumen yawning in its slow red fire coming out of the throat in an image a hypothesis a galaxy in the linen a rock like a bald head sunlight on a glass of water.

Near the railroad tracks that run along the south side of Chicago there is an entertaining guitarist heaving an unpredictable music into the world where it dangles a big sound wedged between words a skein of red wool an emotion hot as a sauce pan I feel like going for a walk in the snow or collapsing on a bed full of big soft pillows we lift such heavy problems in life sometimes the kinetics of it is quite real problems have a life of their own I got this idea when I was in Butte, Montana in 1889. It made me what I am today an old man with a black hat.

Hammer a float together and what you get is a play about a killing. We won’t say what the play is you just have to come to terms with it on your own if you know what I mean. Trudge through a swamp and squeeze the reptiles. Joke. Perturb. Hold onto your life with words. Build a paragraph of imperative and brilliant language just to see what it does. Oil it occasionally. When you see the density and nacreous sheen of a shell you think to yourself my word all the essence of life is there. And then you go and take a knife from the edge of the table and begin to carve a tunnel of scurrying animals which will be suitable for a shirt and the growl of a hat.

Describe a snake by pasting the flow of water to a kitchen faucet surround it with railroad tracks and celebration granite quarried in central Minnesota.

I make a line and another line follows and Colorado spruce and a bite of steak and the movement of something below moving quickly with fins and twenty or thirty pounds of bark mulch.

I plan to include more daffodils next time. A destiny is a fine thing to have but what a strange maneuver to lounge around during battle get down on your knees and squeeze the sand use a gesture like chemistry to understand yourself you are not just in the world the world is in you you are the world and there is more than one world there is also Milwaukee.

I tremble to think of it. Tremble to think of the flower squirting pollen so striking to the eye so obscure to the mind taste the invocation of spring but heed the wisdom of winter that’s what I always say the depth of aluminum is nascent in the corners of a sack and when the symbols grow delicious the exhilarating odor of poetry blossoms into an apparition a howling waterfall absurd beneath the breath a waterfall packed in a word the meaning of it dripping with nails.

A person to whom metal and stoneware are living and to whom fruit speaks will never be poor. What is existence if it sinks like an oar in the water? What is the meaning of space in the vaults of the Rocky Mountains?

Genesis, fluidity, dreams. Peony roots in a Conestoga wagon.