The Study of Oak

Study oak, I tell myself. Press your nose against it. Smell it. Touch it. Feel it. There is a god inside.

Beatitude is the steel of well-being. Which is itself fragile as an antique cut crystal English condiment set. Don’t wiggle this sentence. Everything depends on it. Including the sounds of Rome. The opacity of light in a dusty old caboose. Words twinkling and swarming around an hallucination of gravity salt.

The myriad narrations of life are polymers of being. Protein chains in serum albumin. This is called a residue. It’s a residue of thought. My body is engorged with the enigma of the stars. And I felt compelled to write that down. And now it’s an arabesque of gold and rattlesnake blood fluttering in the thorny truth of blackberries.

If I plate breaks in Africa, I can hear it in China.

The mountain pulls itself into a thought with a serenade of cedar and pine. I walk to the end of a promontory and look out over the valley. A song of thread pulses in a violet sky. Death is a glissando of snow falling on the river. Life is a cartoon drawn by creosote and grace.

I wonder what’s the best way to experience a philodendron, grip a revolver, or put something down on paper that will shine and spurt. I like things that spurt. The last bit of mustard from a plastic bottle. Water after you twist the nozzle and all that pressure gushes out onto the driveway where little incipient weeds twist their way through the cracks in the concrete.

Life makes me dizzy. There’s so much of it. So much possibility. So many choices. I’m always indecisive. Don’t know which way to go, what to do for the cat, best way to get to the bank, which bank, and what’s money anyway but a form of language: this paper means I spent X amount of time laboring for humanity, this is my share, my portion in the struggle to attain well-being, which is what we’re all after, all trying to achieve, all trying to figure out the best way to go about it, there are no maps for the future.

Sometimes money just falls into people’s laps. There’s no pattern or predictability to it whatsoever. Hence, the popularity of casinos.

So many fragrances in the air this time of year. Things blossom at different times. It begins in May, and by July I’ll start getting nosebleeds from all the pollen. Fine ocher dust collecting on the paprika red of our Subaru.

Don’t get me going on clouds. Endless fascination there. I’ll get a crook in my neck from staring up at the sky all the time.

My absorptions spin and shine. I’m haunted by antiquities of gold and granite. There’s no wave whose form and direction is entirely predictable. The wind can adjust things in less than a second. I feel the universe spread its wings. If I speak in metaphors it’s because the intimacy of the moment has become pink with affability. Even the cement solicits a reciprocity of spirit.