The Sway of Damaged Weather

Write a coffee so that it feels like wildlife. We sometimes have to distinguish between a feeling and a revelation. One is increasingly sweaty and one involves spurs and rubble. Garden the field of inscrutability before the weather of time petrifies the flowers of philosophy. I have tangled this thought in murmurs of hypnopompic snow. Why, I don’t know. Because the giant has not yet left the field. Perhaps that’s it. Perhaps not. All I know is a that crumpled ball of thought approximately the height of a domestic animal, a cow or donkey, can be an effective substitute for agriculture if it ambles back and forth in a sentence whose merits include an acreage of dark rich soil and a large red barn.

Age is not my friend. I have flexed some steam today. This proves nothing. This proves that I can move an eye through a tear and find another form of weather on the other side.

If I say the opposite of what I mean the result is a black car under a fir tree. But if I say that I can bend the truth the truth will not bend. The result is sad, extravagant, and non-specific. Not entirely a waste of time, no, but hollow and clumsily arabesque. You can use it for smoking fish but not for actual fishing. Actual fishing requires a lure, something slimmer and shinier than truth. Something you can only find within. I can’t say what it is. Your within is not my within, but without a within a within is without a without. A within that is without is not within, but if a within is without than what is within?

Sometimes what is required is not entirely what you may think you need.  This is a circumstance that calls for reflection. The relation between the thing that is named and the name itself can be confusing. Is it a provocation or a conjuration? Is it a proposal or a trajectory? What exactly does it mean to activate the organs of speech, to move the tongue and the lips, to cause a vibration in the larynx, to fill an utterance with breath and set it sailing into the world?

When we say something about something, we make it lie before us, we make it appear. For example: Wyoming. I say I see a lotus in a birdbath and a lotus in a birdbath appears. Saying a thing is seeing a thing. But this has little to do with Wyoming. Wyoming gets up and walks away. Goodbye, Wyoming, it was good to see you.

If I sew what I see the mind considers it seen.

Or sewn. Seen and sewn. Sewn and seen. The needle penetrates the fabric of thought and goes up and down, in and out, creating patterns that contradict the ontology of popcorn.

I probe the surrounding obscurity with a delicate antenna. It’s how I get around, you know? I feel my way, as they say. Anyone who has entered a dark room without knowing where the light switch is knows what it is to feel a wall with one’s hand until the shape of a light switch is discovered beneath one’s fingers. The switch is switched, the light comes on.

Have you ever tried that with a human being, put a few words out there in the course of a conversation to see what they might stir up, to see if a light goes on? The light comes in and we see a landscape of canyons and buttes and Joshua tree desolation.

It’s not easy to elude a wilderness. As soon as we enter a language we enter a wilderness. Evergreens sway in lovely deviation. A spectral agitation anticipates the shape of the propeller. All sweet things that come from the air merit the dance of paregoric in the blood and around the bone. This is a wisdom that comes from the pursuit of beauty. This is a heat heard softly in the murmur of coal.