The Osmosis Of Jazz

Style meets substance on the road ahead and merges with the traffic. Curaçao is blue in the red house of logarithms. Chintz plus fungus equals llama. And there, I said it. Everybody gets a shot to be deputy. Me, I’m the deputy of whimsicality. The pollen is random but the momentum is real. Cognition is mostly ants going off in all directions.

Is it difficult to change? Yes, it is. Extremely. But it can be done. Cosmetic is a Greek word. So is cosmos. There is a universe in your cologne, revelations in lather.

My life has been an odyssey, erratic turns, novelties, joys, the willingness to experience incongruities, thriftless fugues, slippery latitudes, irritations like small edible fruit that get you drunk and turn you mad with memory.

Rubber Soul, age 18, San José, California. Streams of consciousness nourish the flame at the tip of a candle.

But why say ‘tip’? Where else would a flame be? Fire can be mesmerizing.

Fifty-two years later I go outside to see what asshole is throwing cherry bombs in the parking lot. Kids in the park. Can’t see them. I just shout into the darkness.

Down below, at the south end of the lake, where all the high-tech companies are moving in, I see tall building cranes festooned with blue Christmas lights. There is salvation in stars. But if you don’t have stars, there’s always the lights of the city.

I worry about the lack of birds this winter. I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking birds migrate. But not as much as you think. And yes, I, too believe that paradise can sometimes be found in a capsule. But will it last? That’s the question.

For example, there’s a hardware store down on 15^th West with a big display of doorknobs in the window. I find that fascinating. I imagine Marcel Duchamp standing there gazing at all those knobs, choosing to mount one as a readymade. He’s dead now, of course, but maybe I could do it for him. So imagine that. Imagine this paragraph full of doorknobs. Now reach out your hand and turn one. Does it turn? Does a door open? Good.

My life has been a shipwreck at times, the rumble of a big barn door, the lowing of cattle, that mournful sound, those smells of shit and straw, and later the whistle of a kettle on a wood-burning stove. I go in and sit down and listen to the furniture. Surrealism sparkles like pearls of irrational beauty.

Things to do in Martinique: breathe the air, smell the many fragrances, ride a horse, watch sunlight pass through a glass full of Chablis, a group of gynecologists peering into a hole in the ground. I see sensuality as a flowering of being. An openness that comes over you and shakes your senses loose as you sit and absorb the atmosphere, no division between you and the external world, voices lifted in hymn, the pullulation of words seeking life and fulfillment in the eyes of an attentive reader.

The ego is propped up by wealth. There’s a certain brilliance in the conception of money. But you can’t trust it. Money cannot be trusted. It’s too ethereal, too volatile. It’s like the slosh of sauce, the piquancy of spice, a man jerked out of a stupor in time to see a train go by where he was standing just a minute ago counting the money in his wallet.

Once, there was a snowman arrested for loitering. His lawyer came for a visit, but the snowman couldn’t be found. There was just a puddle on the floor.

Do snowmen have lawyers? Sure they do. Lawyers made of snow.

Let’s drip.

…sings Irma Thompson: it’s raining so hard, looks like it’s going to rain all night.

Singing is different from thinking. Singing is infused with feeling. Thinking is a hungry mind trying to relieve its own inflammation.

By thinking. Ain’t that a gas?

Thinking transpires in the act by which the thinking subject differentiates itself from its thought. A fiddle is a violin, after all, it’s just played a little differently.

The first time I saw the ocean I couldn’t take it all in at once. Nothing is ever so near to us as the personal, physical feeling of our own being letting the world in. It’s like gazing at an ascension of angels on a cloth of stains. The females have organs on the dorsal webs of their arms. Everything feels like a nebular holiday of junkyard secrets. Birds in dizzying formations. The actuality of twigs. The tortured constancy of lava. The play of light and shadow in a Lisbon bistro. The jubilant brightness of morning in the Valley of the Moon.

Here’s a coupon for ointment, the delicacy of prepositions. We’re all trapped in an illusion of choice, each of us a personality churning in animal tissues. I feel like an ordained fool, an isthmus of unsatisfied consequence condensed into a diving board. Here I go, leaping into space.

Obscurity works best as a meringue of equivocation, a web of abstract commitments. What I want is an augmentation of choice. Not destiny. Who needs that? Destiny is for mythologies. Byzantine monks seeking the ascetic life. Princess Syringe and her system of doors. I want something more geometric, more like the glories of distillation, the colors of the athanor, the feeling that something is about to happen, something real, something exciting, something like photosynthesis or lingerie.

Petroglyphs in the Draa River Valley of Morocco.

The osmosis of jazz.

Whim

We must be careful not to punish the whim or wham the whim with whatnot. The whim within, the whim without, the whim whom folly molds in wobbly wonder. The whim of whims, which is a worldly whim, and is whimful with whimfallity. The inscrutability of the whim is notably willy-nilly. The whim whims to whim itself. The boil of the whim loiters in ham. The whimsical whim has goose whimples. To ogle a whim is to whim oneself into whimsiness. Heideggerian whims hold Being as it moves toward the shore in ripples of time. Whipples of Rhyme that rim the whim in lime. The whim, the great whim, the whim of whims, is whittles and wheels. The wink of the whim is tender. The lion of whims is wholesome and wide. The whale is awash in whim. The whim is full of mirth and mirth is a mirror of life. The whim protects the mileage of the old. The solutions of whims merge on the play of isms. The philosophy of the whim is puzzling but suggests a superstructure of moose antlers. The shortcake whim is a bolt in the door of time. The whim that is wisdom is a wiliness of whims. The guava whim, the jerk whim, the hallelujah hallway haphazard whim. Synthetic whims do not work. They decline into checkers. The true whim is an outcropping in polite society, intrinsically fluid, thermodynamically preposterous. Ladies and gentlemen, we stand at the end of empire, cradling whims in our thoughts, holding to them dearly, as newly ordained codicils to a rip tide of fools.

Thermodynamics As A Community Of Nouns

Antiques guarantee the gravity of the blowtorch. The welder lifts his helmet and nods to the apparitions dancing on the walls. The zoom lens moves in on stilts. Our tour begins its journey of unicorns and broccoli. Clouds scudding through the sky inform us of feelings yet to be felt, celebrations yet to be celebrated, funerals prophesied in the guts of frogs, tendrils of sinister cloud hanging down from the heavens like twisting anacondas of hell’s colorful aristocracy.

Is life a simulacrum of somewhere finer and better, or is this it, is this the sleep from which we must awaken? Puddles return the sky to itself after all the water that has fallen out of it. Isn't that what writing is? What words are? A refund, a redemption, items from a lost and found, sad, enigmatic objects with stories to be told?

You can masturbate almost anywhere. But try to be discreet. Sometimes all you need is a sack in the hand and a destination in mind to survive the hazards of impulse. If you manage to keep your pants up, the world will reveal the magic of espionage. Let us tromp through the world like God’s spies, quiet, unassuming blokes boiling with paradigms and saints, temperamental philosophers painting despair on the good soft linen of our redundancies.

My gaze sometimes turns to the mouthwash on the counter and stays there, lost in that beautiful blue of the liquid, cool and divine.

Who was the first human to say ‘water’? And what was their word? Their word for water. In Norwegian vann. German wasser. Zulu amanzi. Welsh dŵr. Vietnamese nước.

Tôi muốn đi bơi.

Or, as Hegel put it, Die Externalisierung des Willens als subjektiver oder moralischer Wille ist Handlung.

This plywood is nascent. That is to say, the spice is in the rack, and the senses are aroused. The revolution snaps into place and everything begins to look seaworthy. The embryo of a novel crawls into its pages and begins to evolve. Characters develop, ideas are floated, a cake is baked, pleasantries are exchanged. The world crackles as it turns in space. Virtues are decided. The novel ends with a symposium on perception: is it true that we all see things differently?

Yes.

And no.

Night glitters in its empire. The horses jingle in their bells. The concept of property decays in its archaisms. What is it to own something? Is it simply to exclude others from the use or enjoyment of something, or is there an actual bond, a eucalyptus hardened against the vagaries of the sidewalk? I am silver in my reflections, but platinum at my wedding. Audacity talks a good game but in the end it all comes down to pineapple. Yellow winds bronze the face of history. Pharmaceutical concerns are packed in cotton. The cows are built with kettledrums. Fog rolls in. The light turns red. We hear a faint music in the background. I lean forward to kiss you.

Still here? Still reading? Thank you.

All it takes is a puff or two to blow the little hairs off of the computer screen.

Nothing is really empty. Not even nothingness is empty. This is what makes Mallarmé so unpredictable. Lightning riddles the conjurations of his words. Galaxies hurl through the room proposing an end to pain. I find a wilderness in my skull teeming with resurrection when I shave. Why resurrection? What is not brought back when we most think it dead? Gone and buried? Nothing dies. Energy can neither be created or destroyed. It just assumes different forms. It stumbles into a flint and becomes a spark. It merges with traffic and becomes a horn. It flings itself into moonlight and becomes a trout. It is expressed in numbers. It becomes calculus. It becomes chalk on a blackboard. Nipples and ripples and wildly expressed panaceas.

Splendor, glory, magnificence and softball.

Hardball is different. Hardballs are stitched by hand and have a round cushioned cork center. I mention this because embroidery only enters the picture later, when there is time for discussion, and no one needs to be goaded or tilted in order to talk. There is a loud whack and the ball bounces to left field where it is caught by a pterodactyl and carried to the end of this sentence and dropped.

I pick it up and hear a giant monotony walking around inside of it. Cork. Or Corky, if you prefer. Consider the sport healed at last. A line drive to first will simply be a luminous stream of consciousness that might be talked about later, when it’s quiet and the crowds have gone home. There is a cure for the clarinet as well. But it must be taken in abstract form or there is a tendency to smear the air with drums. 

Slow Henry

I like the light bulbs in the bathroom. The little bulbs at the top rim of the mirror. Where it begins in the morning. My face. That person standing in the brightness wandering how it all began, where did it all go, why is there something rather than nothing? How much longer before the artic ice disappears? Before we all disappear?

A lot of us hope that doesn’t happen. But you can’t stand on hope.

Hope is nonsense. I don’t like hope. It sets you up for disappointment. It swarms with delusion.

I offer, as an alternative, dispensation. I can’t give it to you. I don’t have that kind of authority. Not even in a place like this, which isn’t a place so much as a process. But I leave it here at your doorstep as a suggestion. A proposal. An invitation.

There are times, I think, when thinking makes things emerge, all that energy in the brain, whatever one chooses to call it, does sometimes produce a helpful image, a furnace, an athanor, a Slow Henry, as the alchemists called it. There are experiences and translations of those experiences. Distillations, sublimations, compounds. One can make of the world a loom of golden parables. A bonfire. A surf. A thunderous pounding of water on a sandy beach in Tabatinga.  

Lumber, at the very least. Planks of pine and oak in a drafty building.

I think I’m a carpenter who builds things with ink, and the next thing you know, I’ve created a birdhouse of words, a wordhouse.

Ok, maybe that’s not just a good example. It’s a nice wordhouse, as wordhouses go. Why abuse it with rumination? The glow of a hinge in the hodge-podge of the ponderous shines forth to inform the senses of phenomena begging description and definition.

Is why.

Am I negligent? I try not to be. I try to be careful. I try to notice things. I try to notice what I’m doing. Even though, much of the time, I don’t know what I’m doing.

Sometimes I see Herculean colors fissioning in the pretext of a sunflower and amalgamate it into a heliotrope.

Drugs can be adjectives. Adjectives can be excursions. Excursions can occur on water. Water can be random. Water loves being random. Though I think it’s a mistake to arbitrarily attribute self-awareness to water. Water is water. Sloppy. Like me. Who is 60% water.

If mistakes were money I’d be a millionaire. This is why I believe singing belongs in an elevator. My singing. Which is strange and full of experience. You can’t boycott experience. Experience just happens. I was born to be a comma.

The lobster has a weird body. But it’s not the fault of the lobster. It is the responsibility of the lobster to be a lobster, to eat what a lobster needs to eat to continue being a lobster, take some time out to reproduce, make more lobsters, bring more lobsters into the world, in whatever manner lobsters have devised for themselves to reproduce. And what makes the body of the lobster weird to me? These are simply my perceptions. I’m sure that my body is weird to the lobster. If (as one might assume) the lobster has any sense of what might be an anomaly, an anatomical eccentricity, then certainly the lobster will perceive the human body as extraordinary. Skin, for example, might seem strange to a lobster, adorned as it is in a carapace equipped with claws and antennae. It’s hard to think what a lobster thinks. Meanwhile, I listen to the Rolling Stones sing “Blue Turns To Gray,” which has little to do with lobsters and everything to do with feeling troubled, feeling uneasy, feeling unsatisfied.

I’m tangled up in gray. I squeeze the morning sun. The Beast hands me a shaker of salt. The horizon splits the day from night. I feel eloquent as a speed bump.

I belong to a strange group of people called poets. Imagine being immersed in an activity with no commercial potential. Abstraction feeds on reverie. I keep feeding abstraction. Abstraction plays comparisons into prospect. The whipped cream articulates the rhythms of our conversation.

Money is always hypothetical. Surround yourself with healthy advantages.

My species has not been successful.

A book is written each time someone reads it. There is redemption in the present. The only cure for summer is more summer. I’m soaked in phenomenology. Who knew that everything in the world was so delicately interrelated? Let’s go searching for mushrooms in Iceland. Interactions heal the poverty of power.

Here are some artifacts of the 17^th century: an embroidered shoe, Constance Hopkin’s beaver hat, a lobed Delft dish with a swan.

The frenetic taste of conflict keeps words churning in my brain. I see Buffalo Bill filling an SUV with gas. The pregnant charm of a drugstore. The spectral dots of Dagwood.

As much as I ingest the world, I exhibit the world. I like swimming in swimming pools. Rivers freak me out a little. It’s hard to carry a generation in your voice. The kiss of wealth decomposes rapidly. What you want to do is get reborn. Look what happens when you stay alive this long. A broken escalator is just another set of steps. Use them carefully. Each step is important.

A man gets into a red Mazda and it coughs into action, electricity careening through the wires.

The hammer is immersed in its purpose. All the electrical cords get tangled up here in the eternally humid Northwest. My fingers respect the feeling of aluminum. Don’t panic if the immaterial materializes. Celebrate the fact of your existence. The drapery redeems the view. An embryonic telecast bubbles on my lap. Pathos is a giant sip of universe. 

Here I Am

Everyone knows how life happens. It’s over in a flash. Meanwhile, there’s soup and mythology. Light gleaming on the Seine as it roams through Paris. Bombs and machine guns everywhere the U.S. claims empire. A woman in Rome bending over to pick up a beach ball. It’s 7:27 p.m. November 14^th and I’m sitting on a bed with a tuxedo cat reading Persian Pony by Michael McClure, “THE SOFT NEW SOUL / with its capsule of masks / tender and quivering / ascends into matter / and here I am.” Fingers, fingernails, laptop, breath. A presence to myself until the absence I try to imagine occurs, and I cease to occur, hopefully before the arctic ice melts, and tens of millions of tons of methane are released into the already stressed and out-of-balance atmosphere. You can’t stop extinction. You can’t stop habitat loss. But you can focus on the present. The slippery, elusive present. Now it’s here, and now it’s gone. Here again, gone again.  

And so some words walk around trying to be a pineapple. Let’s let them. Welcome to smart investing. Welcome to the play of the concertina. Opinions shaved in the rain. Indigo octopi.

Curls, corkscrews, swirls, convolutions. Nothing in life is linear. It’s waves and oscillations, embellishments and sleep. It’s the weight of a dream, the murmur of wind in the trees. Cool water in a Peruvian jungle. A scratched Parisian angel. The mercurial spur of gossip, broken rain crumpled into gold. Theorems in serums. Sandstone arch in August heat.

We live in a world of flux. We are flux. Everything is soaked in phenomenology. Some say it’s the singer not the song. I say it’s elves riding on the backs of swans. Running over tree roots to avoid puddles. The opinions of a lotus. The force of subtlety in a drug taking effect. Truffles in the Dordogne. The thunder of giants punching eternity with improvisations of water.

Neon chrysanthemums. My bare feet resting on the blue sheep of a white blanket.

Eager fingers on a limestone ledge.

Puff on the seeds to be born into myth. The tongue is soaked in redemption. The stones of Iceland aren’t there to glitter in idleness they’re a punctuation of convergences, druid moons and Viking purgatories. Lug the pilgrim to the call of the lake. The singer of the song is unknown, but the song itself is exempt from agriculture, and paddles like a swan across a pond of belief.

Belief is a diversion. Agriculture was a mistake. Let us convene instead with the spirits.

Remember the spirits?

The spirits of water, the spirits of lingering, the spirits of sustenance and fever. Rosie and The Originals. Angel Baby.

I have a silver buckle and a hat of chaotic mahogany. Streams of consciousness percolate through the roots. A musician buys diamonds for his guitar. I talk about the problems of aging and mortality with a friend while a foreign melody gets dressed in a person with leprosy. I don’t feel like ironing today.

I’m the Rembrandt of butter. Regret is a drawer in my skull. If I see the weirdness of wax drooling down the stick of a candle I want to paint it. There’s a momentary pause in time that sometimes reveals itself as a pale morning sun. It’s that moment of stillness right after the waitress has cleared and wiped the table and no one has been asked if they want more coffee yet.

Pains have personalities. Some of them emerge in music and some of them enter into Being like 150 pounds of pressure in a tire designed for 125 pounds of pressure. I like the ones that float in the air like astronauts looking down at Planet Earth weeping. The ones I don’t like churn in the brain unendingly with no resolution. They’re like the entanglement of vines in a blackberry bush, the insane repetitions of traffic around the Arc de Triomphe.

Rumination is a dead end. Time suspended in a cuckoo clock. A stuffed wildcat with its mouth open. Mickey Rourke gazing into a tank of rumble fish.

Think of chiaroscuro as an old man scrounging for change. The soul of white is black. Defining anything is a delicate process.

I’ve always loved the effects of darkness and light in Rembrandt’s paintings. Among my favorites is The Philosopher in Meditation. An old man sits by a window through which a golden light diffuses its warmth. To the immediate right is a spiral staircase. And to the right of the staircase an old woman bends over to tend a fire in an open hearth. The philosopher is very calm, hands folded, head tilted slightly forward, as if with a weight of thought, or immersed in reverie. All around is darkness. It’s the darkness that makes the light so voluminous and alive.

How does one get to the essence of something? We all want to see the interior of things. Interiority is a constant fascination. Everyone feels deceived on some level. Everyone seeks quiddity. The vital truth of a thing. A chair, a table, a person, a cat.

Though perhaps not its essence so much as its whatness. Its presence as a thing in itself.

Time walks around in my head dropping memories. Some of them are long and delicate, and some of them are abrupt and brutal. A few are dopy. A lot of them are thematic. There is one in which I am crowned King of England and introduced to the dining room staff. I take long steps of introversion in a royal chamber of books and ledgers. Liquids bubble in tubes and flasks. I create a new velocity for the indecisions of purple. Malachite and jasper sparkle around my neck. A jet flies over a Fed Ex Office. I keep trying to write my way out of this world. Autonomy is a prompt solution. I use it carefully. But even that is a mistake. The train is a hymn of steel feeding on its own reverie.

Throw another log into the fire. The poem is ample that never loses it clarity. But you’re not going to solve any riddles that way. What you need is a salute to nothingness, the superfluity of leaves blowing around in the wind. I can offer you a place to sprawl and dream. Do you feel the sting of a needle? Don’t worry, it's just a spark from the foundry of apples.

The Emperor Of Macaroni

Speed is aromatic when it becomes lightning. Who are you? Ribbon is one solution. Moccasins are another. Density is magnificent with mermaids. Think of this as a phenomenology of reaching and reading and reaching for something to read. Of pianos and cockpits. Syncopation and garlic. Wax and honey, which are lieutenants of bric-a-brac, and dare to matter in a world of geeks and grossly inflated salaries. Even though, when you think about it, the sponge is every bit as brilliant as a whale, and a crisis such as this can loosen our frosting. I think it's wonderful that things exist. That the nose is naturally Zen and that one’s chains are imaginary. Break them. Drop them. It’s wonderful that magnesium can be a waitress and that the color gray can fall into the hands of a dwarf and televise the chlorophyll of a milkweed. That lips have their own brand of chivalry. That success can mean so many different things to so many different people. This hour will dissolve within the limits of another hour and various sensations will hatch out of that and become words in a sentence. Drop everything and run into the sky. Pasta is sensual because the streets are full of wasps, not because hope is cruel, and it takes courage to foster a load of despair. Hope is a delegation from a future that doesn’t exist. Don’t go there. 

Nothingness Wins Again

Enigmatic reverie package that comes from sparkling spray. Gotta buy me some fire and a bear, some foliage and a bell, a pair of pants and a nice green pump and a warehouse of suede. Anything that models the cylinders of a pretty nickname. I will be the meaning I want, lavender buttons and bliss. Antenna gum that stretches all the dust of life and a cricket singing from a high edge of facts about brackets, which are delegations of pearl. Wild abstraction with a reason to open a bean.

Oil and turpentine and a shade to undertake the lassitude of ash.

If space is within space, then spatiality must have something to do with recompense. I will call it a dollar. Which expresses the camel hiding among my nerves. The desert, the wind, the dunes, the drift of detachment. And this is happening with a claw and a negligence of rocks. Acute crumbling of a cabbage sorbet. Bienvenue au Palais Idéal.

This is my electric yellow pin. I am in the east licking the power that is nature. I smell sweet from my locomotive stomach but I don’t really care about the friendliness of furniture unless it starts talking like sparrows, which reminds me of Hamlet, and the sweet beginnings of stars, and then I cry the long thin tears of supplication and collapse to the floor and become a chair.

What is causation? Does anyone really know?

I have been talking about what is ready-to-hand. But what about assemblage? The sandwich on the counter at the diner? What about jaws, and brightness, and indigestion?

Equipment, too, has its place, or it just lies around collecting dust. The nosegay doesn’t  appear at random. It is there in accordance with its involvements.

Allegiances are further complicated by disagreements over what events, facts, and these other creatures are. Some seem precise, like the praying mantis, whereas others are whiskered, and whistle like steam. How is it possible for one mind to know another? Is there a phenomenology that cooks like rice but is better than caviar?

I believe that there is gold in the cave and that it doesn’t harm the glory of being a little lost among the shadows when they bring a little reflection to the glitter of its veins. Listen to the bullish scrap woman who does ironing on the sidewalk of a rose. The thorn clock piloting the edge of a wave at the monastery. These are reasonable and sipped. Indications assembled to accommodate the decipherment of cause.

As for causation, let’s explain it with quarks. Binoculars and breakfast. Causation is the cause of cause. The cause of giants lifting the ocean into rain. The cause of hope, which is appalling in its constipation. The cause of the cashew, which is expensive, and the cause of the peach, which is lips. A hammer causes itself by hammering.

Exclaims nothingness, which is now a nail in a two-by-four of an insect cycling around an apple.

Out Of Control

I enjoy the sensations of things, doorknobs, laundry warm from the dryer, spider legs scampering over my palm, water when I’m thirsty, symphony strings, Buddy Guy doing some straight up insane things on his guitar, the weight of a book in my hands.

Did you know that horses are able to identify emotion in human facial expressions? I can’t even do that. What I can do is reveal or conceal an emotion depending on circumstances.

There are landscapes I could never describe. Not with paint, not with words, not with echoes or inclines or swamps. The whole is always going to be greater than the sum of its parts. This is especially true of landscapes, fjords, inlets, lakes, clouds, late afternoon light on a Tuscany hill.  

I like the feeling of the word ‘seethe’ as it seethes through my teeth. As this from Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, “go, suck the subtle blood ‘o the grape till the high fever seethe your blood to froth.” Or this, from Pencillings, by N.P. Willis, “Cold meat, seethed, Italian fashion, in nauseous oil.”

Do you see? Each word is a history, a palimpsest, a landscape. Cold meat seethed in nauseous oil. The workings of wine in the blood, turning it to froth, delirium and groping. Daydreaming. Musing on the grain of the wood of an old dark bar. Big arguments with the hands waving. Voices raised in speech, or singing, or the flutter of syllables on the ear in a foreign country, where the weight of what is being said is hidden among its vowels.

The word ‘landscape’ comes from Old Saxon ‘landscepi.’ Old Norse ‘landscap.’ The word was later introduced as a technical term by painters, a picture representing natural inland scenery. Or as I like to call it: the language of earth as it is spoken by wind and rock.

The loose dirt of the Palouse is called ‘loess.’ It’s soft and fine and nourishes the soft white wheat of the Palouse, which goes into the making of pastries, apple strudel and cinnamon rolls.

Since consciousness seems to be localized within my head, I always have the feeling of being in an airplane, in which case the landscape I’m looking down at is generally a carpet, if I’m barefoot in our apartment, or the sidewalk, one of many sidewalks, here in Seattle or in Paris or Minneapolis, which is a little like Paris, in that it has a river running through the city, about the same size as the Seine, but called the Mississippi, and is legendary, and full of catfish.

I remember standing on the Pont Neuf in the winter of 2015 looking down at the Seine, which looked wild and turbulent, weirdly green in color, heavy with French dirt, French landscape, paysage as they call it.

My eyes fill with the light of a thousand bright yellow leaves stuck to the sidewalk at the top of Highland Drive. The temperature is 45 degrees and is invigorating and moist. The sky is gray. It’s mid-November and Seattle’s skyline gleams below. I feel good, but can’t shake the sadness caused by hearing Guy McPherson’s grim predictions. McPherson was a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona until he left his position to live on an off-grid homestead in southern New Mexico. He has since moved to Belize and put his property in New Mexico up for sale. He is best known for his talks on imminent mass extinction due to the accumulation of greenhouse gases in earth’s atmosphere, a situation he deems long out of our control. He states a paradox: if all industrial production stopped this minute and no more pollution entered the atmosphere, the heating of the planet would be accelerated since the pollutants in the atmosphere act as a filter, diffusing the sun’s heat.

McPherson delivers his talks in a calm, measured, eminently rational voice. He supports his claims with compelling facts. He has a warm presence and emphasizes the importance of enjoying life to its fullest, living in the present moment, seeking excellence in a culture of mediocrity and continuing to floss one’s teeth. He tries to put a redemptive spin on our imminent doom by urging us to do what we love, disburden ourselves from the encumbering shackles of false hope and the oppressive tyranny of jobs and money and live to the fullest while we still can. But it doesn’t work. Extinction sounds horrible. The death he describes sounds awful: when heat and humidity rise to a certain level, we behave drunkenly, because our organs are boiling.

Other climate scientists, such as Michael Tobis at the University of Wisconsin, say McPherson’s claims are incompetent and grossly misleading. I don’t know what to think. I tend to think Tobis is correct and McPherson is wrong. I want Tobis to be correct and McPherson to be wrong: way wrong. I’m not a big fan of human beings, they’ve been responsible for a great deal of ruin and savagery and pain, but I don’t want to see humanity go extinct, any more than I want to see other species go extinct. I mean, didn’t the dinosaurs do better? They managed to stick around for 165 million years. Think of it: big old walking Walmarts of bone and flesh. And what about dinosaur farts? I don’t get it. Is it all this cortical activity that’s gotten us humans into so much trouble in such a short amount of time?

It would be so much nicer if I could just reject McPherson’s claims wholesale and get on with my life. But I can’t, not quite. I can’t shake the sadness nor the truthfulness implicit in McPherson’s words that easily. It will take more than Tobis’s rigorous mathematics to do it. The wildfires and hurricanes and droughts this last summer were horrendous. Clearly, something very, very wrong is occurring to our planet. And it’s just the one planet; there aren’t any more available when this one is finally, irreparably lost.

Flash drought destroyed half the wheat crops this year.

But enough of that.

Why is it that the things over which I have the least amount of control are the things hardest to let go of?

I think the answer is right there in the question: no control.

Most of the time, the only thing I truly have control over is how to respond to things. And even there I have to separate instinct from intellect.

I have no control over the maniacs using leaf blowers in the rain when everything is sopping wet and stuck to the ground, or the jerks whose leviathan SUVs and four-by-fours won’t fit in their driveways and stick out over the sidewalk blocking everyone’s way, or the ongoing looting of the American population by their “elected” officials, and their cronies, the banks.

Making money out of thin air. “Don’t think money does everything or you are going to end up doing everything for money,” said Voltaire. Amen to that.

The Elegance Of Leaving

Why are ghosts always represented as bed-sheets? Death is nothing. Nothing without England and its historical debris. Nothing without a fugitive understanding of life’s most basic courtesies. Sleep and nuance. Umbrellas and cows.

The invention of thirst comes to us dressed as a mythical taffeta in the tenacity of an ant. Red feathers on a white table. Certitude. Incertitude. The philosophy of yourself.

An X-ray and the light behind the X-ray. Bones. Prisms. Gregorian chant.  

Nothing beats the elegance of leaving a job. A party. A bad marriage. An excruciating eulogy. A firm decision. An endless war. An ideology gone sour.

Death is nothing. The fragrance of a casket is unaffected by its mystery. It is sometimes sudden, sometimes long and inquiring. 

Death is nothing but hoes in a row in a pink garage. Brian Jones smiling at Howlin’ Wolf. Letters thrashing around in a sentence. Nothingness is underrated. So is the shine on the shell of a crab. Eyebrows are incidental, like molasses and papier collé.

The poet is a nomad with nowhere to go. The United States has become an open-air prison with an extortionate hellcare system. I’m old enough to remember streetcars. So when I say that the poet has nowhere to go, I mean nothingness articulate as a gravel driveway. I mean clumsy indications of death walking through the eye of a needle. I mean camel. I mean rich man. I mean crinkly old dollar and words in a process of waves moving up and down a cobra neck-tie.

Poetry is an engine of ice, helter-skelter at a Cincinnati gas station. Caress the spine of a dragon. I will tell you what it’s like to eat lobster on a private jet. I will tell you how to articulate the gravel of a driveway without using nails or nutmeg. I once corresponded with a cringe. Which I later pumped to the surface of my skin and showed it around town like a tattoo of shadows boiling in the midnight of a woman’s fingernail. I’m sympathetic to most vibrations, but I’m mostly favorable to the forehead when it’s lit up by a crown of electricity. It’s a good look. I agree to nothing but what goes on in my fingers. Golden oarlocks on a red boat. Think of it as symbolism, something out of the late 19^th century. A huge barroom metaphor that answers the demands of reason with a tiger’s head and a snake between its teeth. I feel the exclamation of stalagmites in my guts. Opinions slam the door on discussion. If you have an opinion nail it to the wall and shoot it with a .38 caliber toad.

Do you like cream in your gridlock? Feathers are marvels of engineering. Can I offer another version of myself that explains these things? Some people like to punch the air when they dance. But I’m not going to pretend I’m Mick Jagger. You don’t know who I am. Who am I? I am you. I am us. I am her. I am him. I am everyone. But mostly I’m a guy looking for a way out of here.

Gravity is a cure for science. But nothing cures a heartache like the bone black in a painting by Rembrandt. No amount of logic can explain a clam. But I can tell you what a sparkle looks like in the eye of a monkey. Watch it dilate. The mind dilates. Did you know? Yes. And I’m hooked on polyphony. A crinkly old dollar. Zen mosquitos on a hairy arm. Bend the milk into asphalt. The forklift lifts a pallet of formaldehyde and so concludes: death is nothing. What is the source of this emotion? Flames thundering out of the bottom of a rocket. The lure of Titan. Buffalo on the plains in 1752.

Cartoon Noises In A Kitchen Sink

Cartoon noises in a kitchen sink. Metal crabs tap-dancing on a China plate. Water running. Two pieces of meat stuck to a spoon. What shall we do with this loaf of elevator? Give it a little baptism. The biology of a feeling, which is soon felt going chromosomal, like a rattlesnake chandelier, or a hymn to the speed bump. Everything in life sooner or later gets to feeling reptilian, or naked, the way a fork throws itself into space.

Words are sticks of meaning soaked in pain.

I stood on the stepladder trying to open a little plastic sack with two little screws in it for the ceiling light mount. It opened of a sudden and the screws went flying. That’s how it always is. Just listen to Gregorio Allegri. Or the murmur of doctors focusing on a bone.

Breakfast explains nothing. I can hear the rustle of rain. It’s early November. I can see a discarded bikini in the Hall of Mirrors. The pulse of a sawhorse wrapped in cloth. How many pounds are in the ghost of a hammer? I agree with my spine. The Renaissance is mostly about music. Science came later, blistered and stubborn, like language. Except language isn’t very scientific. It’s more like swans perched on the top of a barn. You can smell it as it gropes for a coat, or enters the parlor goofy as a traffic cone and sits down on a concertina. Oops.

Concentration is the essence of the concertina. The dreams of a halibut are different. The dreams of a halibut resemble the furniture of winter. The reason is obvious as cocoa.

I wouldn’t characterize myself as jaunty. I fuss over the issue of subjectivity much of the time, but it leads nowhere testimonial. Nothing like an elephant, whose subjectivity is intellectual, and drinks experience from a waterhole of stillness and quiet, poised as a mosquito on a policeman’s arm.

What does it mean to be ambitious? I’m not pleased by the taste of oysters. Never have been. I see a mockingbird on a barbed wire fence and think about the many unseen gears of the escalator. Let your eyes carry this sentence to the end of itself. When you arrive at the end, you will find an abyss. You will see ice and snow. Pain floating in the eyes of a stranger. And that stranger is you.

Or not. Maybe it’s just another bend in the river, random and wide and full of reflection.

What do we mean when we speak of a music as “heavy metal?”

Consciousness is a rag of emotion, the crackle of feeling in a ball of thought. Stars in a jug of white lightning, the many doors to perception.

Did you forget to fall in love today? I didn’t. I just now fell in love with a Dutch apple pie. Oats are easily made, but the many subtleties of sleep are not so easily described. I would like to further explore the idea of Sam Elliott’s mustache. Has it been a boost to his career? Probably. Is it eloquent? Yes. Like a popped balloon, or a star hanging from a thread of music. Crystals sparkling in the arctic night.

My plan throughout life has been to evade too much planning. Stepladders make me angry. They never fold back up right. If I see puddles in a row I think of vertebrae. I think about singing in Montana. Belonging to a choir. I watch the cat as she rolls on the floor, exposing a white fur belly.

Can we bring some words into this sentence that usurp their own progression, that swirl back on themselves and duplicate the invasion of an eggplant? Sure. Why not. I don’t want to get too fancy. Let’s keep things simple and enjoy a sip of universe. It’s calm tonight and my needs are congenial to the employment of various prepositions. Sometimes it takes a powerful drug to walk through a wall. And sometimes all you need is a few prepositions and a warped sense of oligarchy. A jug of conflict and a jar of argument. The heart is an armchair for feelings. So sit back, and let yourself float. The ugliness of time is remedied by oak. And the swans on the barn are quiet as Sam Elliott brushing his hair. 

Close Shave

A careless hue expresses dyeing. A beach bonfire crumbles in the lung kite. I go frisking past scratching my right leg. The wind is melting in an ebony crate. I’m floating in the weather of a bee making words come together.

Mechanical rain a dragon in my head. Neon money for a ruptured chocolate. I see a solitary radical ball that stuns the value of grease. The expansibility of shoe ash excites the senses like a swamp that jumps into an old New England spoon and begins varnishing oats. The lush spring of a streaming friend powers a tug of antique sugar as it journeys across space and time and so begins another rag with which to solace the groan of coupons burdened with impersonating raspberries in the butter Marie Laurencin spreads across this particular slice of bread.

Of course, when I say particular, I really mean bulky and round. You shouldn’t have to think of this as surrealism. It's more like undressing a landscape of sage and smelling the sexuality of noon. Surrealism is for banquets and airports. This is more like lunch with a Q-tip. Anarchic chairs pondered in wild benediction. Fingers on an open G tuning.

It’s almost irritating the way shaving lather keeps coming out of the can when I am sure it must be empty. But let’s face it. Facial hair is intrinsic to the dominion of ivory. It’s not like heresy, not entirely, despite some obvious resemblances. A beard must be worn as a portable device for heroic deeds.

Sometimes sitting in the garage chattering to the shelves about mutiny is the closest I can come to unbending the fizz of lacrosse.

This is where flirtatious 35-year old Charlotte (Laura Prepon) stumbles into the poem, explaining that she has a thing for older men, along with the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay.

I tell her she has the wrong poem and open the door to let her out.

My allegorical knee has a carpenter’s scratch. I win everything by throwing chocolate at a bureau drawer and selling pineapples to a hoe. I attempt to do the same thing to an authoritarian tattoo. How cannot it not know what it is? Who doesn’t like hats? The mission fails miserably and I console myself with ichthyology. I can always try to sputter a few opinions later when the meaning of being reawakens. I’m not going to argue with a menu built around augury.

Holes pause for an eon in a Mediterranean hamburger and the world gets sliced into turf. Nebulous and soft, I sift an obscure hill of dormant tinsel and thereby welcome butter, which is good to me, and simple like sleep. Later, when the proximities loom, luminous insects display their emotions in elevator eyebrows and an aromatic silverware creates a craze for openly indiscriminate music.

Which is the best kind of music. It dreams it’s a cupboard with a canine tooth and plates crashed together and is the sage way to the salt beard. I am bitter about frozen agitation. I like the hint of flexibility on the street, the pendulum of tomorrow mingled with loops of iron like the crashing of words in a foundry. Anything else is just structure, a profession brought up on the hind legs of a uterus.

The Paint With No Name

It’s not infrequent for something very small to get on my nerves. Such was the case in our bathroom. I was taking a shower one day when I noticed the paint in the upper corner had blistered and flaked just a little and that there were a few mold stains along the ceiling where it met the wall. It wasn’t a big deal. I tried to dismiss it but I couldn’t. Once something gets on my nerves, it grinds down and stays there. It would have to be painted.

And why had that corner flaked and blistered? What was going on there? I worried about a leak. Were there any pipes in that spot? I hoped not. I got a small stepladder out of the hallway closet of our building and got up there and poked softly and felt around with my fingers for moisture or gumminess. It didn’t feel like anything was leaking. Maybe it had been the old showerhead that I replaced, a huge bulbous thing with little nodes and holes all over it that sprayed water everywhere. I hope that’s the explanation. So, no plumber (knock on wood) would be required, but it definitely would need to be painted. How was I going to find a match for this paint? It was an off-white with a soupçon of yellow. I didn’t have a name for it. It had been fifteen years at least since I had painted the bathroom. It was probably called something like eggshell white or water lily blonde or coronation champagne. Who knows. I had not been prudent and kept the can. Or written it down.

Finding a match turned out to be embarrassingly simple, albeit a tad pricey. After I scraped some paint away in the corner I was able to collect the flakes that had fallen into the tub in an envelope, which I took to a paint store on Stone Way called Daly’s. A pleasant young man at the counter explained that I could get a mix, but the smallest they could sell me for doing that would be a quart. A quart would be way too much, but if they could find a good match, it would be worth the price, which was around thirty bucks. I picked the paint up a few days later. The match was perfect.

I asked the clerk (this time a young woman) what the name of the paint was. She said it didn’t have a name. It had a number. I looked at the number. It was big, a formidable number. The tint had been calculated with such perfection that it had entered the realm of science, astronomy and quantum mechanics. This wasn’t just paint, it was a Schrödinger equation.

I got the paint home and got everything ready to paint, newspaper and stepladder in the tub, can of paint on the floor also on a sheet of newspaper. I had a critical decision to make. Should I find a small container that I can hold in my hand, or should I dip the brush in the paint and hold it so that the paint does not drip on the tub or floor?

I decided on the latter. It was riskier, but simpler. If I was careful, I would make less of a mess than if I tried to pour the paint into another container. I donned a pair of surgical gloves, opened the can with a screwdriver, and dipped the paintbrush into the smooth white surface of the paint.  There is something very sensual about paint. The gooeyness, the viscosity, the weight of the brush, the richness of color in liquid form, slowly turning the brush in my hand while the excess paint drooled back into the can, then slowly and gracefully raising the brush while positioning myself simultaneously on the stepladder in the tub, all these actions performed with great concentration were a form of meditation, an immersion in a medium of sumptuous stickiness.

Mistakes were made. Mistakes are inevitable. I forgot about our cat, Athena. Athena came wondering in and was naturally curious about what I was doing. She’s fascinated by the shower to begin with. She loves to get her front paws on the edge of the tub after I shower and gaze with great fascination at whatever it was that just took place. She licks herself. She doesn’t see us licking ourselves, but we do get into a shiny place and make water fall on us. In her world, that’s phenomenal.

Roberta had been outside raking leaves. When she came in I hollered to her to remove Athena from the bathroom as I had paint on my hands. Unfortunately, I forgot to warn her about the wet paint on the corner of the wall by the door. She scraped past and got paint on her fleecy blue bed jacket. I told her the paint was not water soluble. She would have to toss the jacket. I would buy her a new one.

And, inevitably, I spotted a few places that I missed, went to reopen the can, got paint on my hands and realized that I’d forgotten to put surgical gloves on. Getting the paint off with rubbing alcohol and soap was the most difficult part of the job. 
       Whether it was the tension of doing the job or the smell and fumes of the paint in an unventilated room I don’t know, but I got a terrible headache later in the evening. My brain felt like it had swelled in overall size by about an inch and was pressing against my skull which was beginning to crack. If headaches  -  like hurricanes  -  had names, I would name this one Vercingetorix after the Celtic warrior king who proved to be such a headache for Julius Caesar during the Gallic Wars. It was tough and stubborn and shaggy and unruly. Celtic to the core. A mean headache. The kind of headache that brings down empires. I could name it that, or I could name it Jon Brower Minnoch, the heaviest man in medical history, who weighed over 1,400 pounds when he was admitted to Seattle’s University Hospital in March, 1978. Two beds were lashed together and it took thirteen people to roll him over for linen changes.

I took some ibuprofen, and the headache dissipated some minutes later. That’s always such a good feeling. It’s as if Jon Brower Minnoch lost 1,211 pounds and strolled out of the hospital at a trim 189 with a smile on his face.

The next day I removed the painter’s tape from the upper wall by the ceiling where I’d painted. It was riddled with paint, which hadn’t yet dried. I tossed the tape, got out the rubbing alcohol, and went to work on my hands again. Paint has a genius for getting and going everywhere. There was even some paint under the tip of my thumbnail. I solved that with a pair of clippers.

I was happy with the result. The bathroom looks great. That yellow tint, the indefinable hue that put the off in off-white, that required calculations as formidable as those assembled at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena or the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland, brightens things up, makes it seem like a fun place to be. Showering and shaving and brushing my teeth and other ceremonies performed to maintain my hygiene are not activities I generally choose to celebrate, or characterize as fun (I would choose very different words), but it’s nice to perform them in a space that’s been augmented by a nameless color of paint, a paint whose hue is so specific in its charm that it eludes the syllables of the mortal realm and hovers somewhere between transcendence and dream.

Each Moment Is A Universe

There is sometimes a good clean feeling of being alive and wet in the rain. Doesn’t matter what age, but if it happens late in life, so much the better. I didn’t think much about being alive in my youth, I was simply alive, simply living, trying to resist some things and experimenting with others, trying to get a sense of what’s good, what’s bad, what’s exciting and stupid, and what’s just stupid. But as an older person, not just older but old, an old person, I think about being alive. Because one, I’m still alive, still doing it, still living and breathing and eating and sleeping and all that good stuff. But two, I’m stuck with all those decisions I made in my youth, and three, there’s not much in the way of destiny at my age.

Destiny is about the future. What happens in old age, what is important in old age, is to stay focused on the immediate, to experience the immediate, squeeze the immediate, hug the immediate, all the while trying to get used to the idea of one’s life coming to an end. The ephemerality of life, its ultimate temporariness, is more acutely felt as we age, and it is both a great sadness and a great liberation. We are brief custodians of a life energy running through us. Our reality is something far greater than the life we encapsulate in blood and bone for X number of years. Not to put to morbid a spin on it, but that’s what’s real at my age. The immediate, the imminent, the actual. The universe at large, of which I am a part, a temporary manifestation of hair and skin, ideas and fingers, daydreams and DNA. “Here feel we not the penalty of Adam,” observes Duke Senior in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, “the season’s difference,

………as the icy fang

And churlish chiding of the winter’s wind,

Which when it bites and blows upon my body

Even till I shrink with cold, I smile and say

‘This is no flattery; these are counsellors

That feelingly persuade me what I am.’

So going out in the afternoon of a day in late October when the air is honing its knife and getting ready for the real cutting cold of December and January and it’s raining and gloomy and gray and there are still people up on Bigelow hunting down chestnut burrs is a luxury of sorts. I can still move, still run, still get wet. The immediate and actual are large and multiple and keenly felt. Each moment is a universe, reads the title of a book by Sōtō Zen roshi Dainin Katagiri.  

It’s hard to appreciate just how vast the universe is. I can’t. Can’t do it. Can’t wrap my head around it. For one thing, it’s infinite. I can’t wrap my head around infinity. I know what it is, it’s boundlessness. Infinity is forever. It’s beyond time, beyond space, beyond Google. It’s beyond my ability to imagine what forever is. I’m a drop in the infinity bucket. Drops are easy. I can imagine myself as a drop. I’ve seen drops. I’ve seen them on the windshield of our car and I’ve seen them run down the windows of our apartment. But the space outside of the bucket and the space outside of the space surrounding the bucket surpasses the limits of my bucket.

My brain  -  the human brain  - weighs approximately three pounds. Planet Earth weighs about 1,000 trillion metric pounds. I can’t squeeze a 1,000 trillion metric ton planet into a three-pound brain. I can, however, form an image of Planet Earth which will fit nicely into my brain. It’s round, it’s pretty, it’s blue and white, it’s clearly defined against the black of infinite space. That part is easy. Thank you, language.

Some things I can picture, some things I can’t. I can picture Wyoming. I can picture a helicopter flying over Wyoming. I can picture a helicopter hovering over a herd of wild mustangs up north in the Pryor Mountains of Montana but I can’t picture myself floating forever into space. I can picture myself floating, I can even picture space, but I can’t picture endlessness. Is there anyone who can? What did George Clooney feel like in Gravity when he let go of the parachute strap holding both he and Sandra Bullock to the remains of the International Space Station and went floating to his death as he utters his last words to Bullock about the beauty of the sunrise on the Ganges. I don’t mean Clooney, of course, but the fictitious character he was embodying, veteran astronaut Matt Kowalski. Suppose it was real, an actual catastrophe, and these events actually occurred: you let go of a strap and go floating for eternity in space. Your air supply will soon be depleted and you will die what I hope would be a peaceful death. How long might your body go traveling through space? Would it go into orbit? Would internal bacteria survive long enough to eat the flesh and leave a skeleton in the suit? Would it soon by hit by a rock? Torn to pieces by debris? You see what happens: the mind begins adding details, tossing them into this fiction and avoiding the central issue: infinity. The horror of eternity.

Endlessness isn’t an image endlessness is endless abstraction. It’s a philosophical concept whose appearance might take the form of infinitesimal calculus, a Taylor series, the mathematics of continuous change. The mind needs limits to form definitions, contours, meanings. Meanings require shapes, purpose, infinity signs. Endlessness has no meaning because it exceeds all boundary and zone and the ghosts of departed quantities. The river never reaches the ocean. The ocean never ceases heaving itself onto land and receding back into the infinite undulation that is the living manifestation of its being. Water is being. It’s why it has waves. It’s why it splashes and swirls. And it’s everywhere. Water is everywhere. It’s in me. It’s in us. It’s all above us, below us, and all around us. It’s in bugs and wolves and scorpions and centipedes. We’re all carriers of water carrying water from one form of water to another, boiling it, pouring it, drinking it. Floating on it, swimming in it, squirting it. The transformations of water are endless. The movement of its ripples on a pond parallel the words in a sentence that remain separate in sound and movement but are a coherence of moving pattern that results in meaning and emotion.

Last night at a reading I heard a writer refer to a Japanese scientist named Masaru Emoto who has discovered that molecules of water are affected by our thoughts, words, and feelings. Water exhibits properties of molecular coherence, and is the main carrier of all the electric signals our bodies generate. Beethoven’s pastoral symphonies, played between two bottles of water, produced beautiful and well-formed crystals. Mozart’s 40^th symphony, a graceful prayer to beauty, “created crystals that were delicate and elegant.” “And the crystals formed by Chopin’s Étude in E, Op 10, No. 3, surprised us with their lovely detail.” I’m assuming that the better the crystal the better the signal produced, leading to a happier, more profound sense of well-being.

But what about heavy metal? What about the rages and hammering rhymes of rap? The big brass sounds of John Philip Sousa’s military marches?

What about polka? What does water do under the influence of polka? Does it Hoop-Dee-Doo? Do the crystals form licorice sticks and peanuts?

 What if I sing in the shower? Does the water pelting my body alter its crystals in accordance with “Knock, Knock, Kockin’ on Heaven’s Door?” I just hear it as it gurgles down the drain. It is I who feel changed when I leave the shower. Water always has a soothing effect on my body. It’s like music heard by my skin. I feel like I stepped out of Mozart dripping symphonies of water. I dry myself with an étude and get dressed in a bisbigliando.

The best possible place to get wet is in the comedy of your own lilypond.

Infinity hurts the head. It tastes like totems on the Kwakiutl shore. Are mind and body one? This should not be a question. This should be leaves glossed with rain. A name in the mud written with a stick. Trek to the store for butter under a black umbrella. This is the mind in the body in the rain of a soggy day. And this is a piece of infinity discarded by time and secreted by hope.

The slop of water the honeycombs of bees. Halibuts are angels of circumstance. Schools of smelt in the emerald calm of the sound. It’s there, infinity. You know it, you can feel it, it’s what gives life this particular taste, feeling. Because we appear here, we are brought here, through conduits of fluid, and it’s by fluid we go, turn to vapor and cloud, if that, and so what, who wants to hang around forever?