Oyster In A Low-Cut Gown

Imagine what you could do with hooves. Mountains and rivers without end. Five women standing in front of a door. Everything is connected by elbow. That odd feeling you get when you go underwater for the first time after going a long time without swimming. That odd quiet and sensation of floating.

My glasses were assembled in Nantes. I say this because numerical instability can occur anywhere there are bad roads and swirling mist. But things eventually settle down. It’s raining so hard, looks like it’s going to rain all night. Here’s another new feeling: the warmth in a shoe someone has just worn.

Cerise asterisks forged in a kimono.

I adhere to the profligacies of coffee. I’ve got a bunch of change in my pocket. I always do. I feed it to the parking meters. It eventually diminishes, like ice in the sun.

Dishrags have faces. I’ve seen them smile. They smile when I rinse them out. The smile appears in the fold, where smiles generally appear, softly imbuing the face with a consciousness of ineffability and beatitude à la Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, or showing all the teeth in a blare of maniacal glee. Now imagine a rag doing that. And hanging it on the faucet, like a delinquent Dasein, an improbable eidos of empirical intuition.

That is smiling at you. With all its teeth in a row.

That is one goofy rag, my friend. Not everything in a submarine is modified to limit noise.

I’m often amazed at the ability of people to sing. The creaking of wood in a medieval mill. The color of thought. Anything analogous to horsepower, or weekends.

Language is a carnival. It has to be that way. Because space is so huge. You know?

There’s a big old chair in the arroyo. The Grateful Dead on the radio in Rock Springs, Wyoming.

I enjoy eating. That must be it. That must be why the electric guitars sounds so good. Like clay between the fingers. You have to love all those rocks. I see Picasso everywhere.

The moon has its subtleties. Demi Moore shaping a phallic vase. How can you not be in love with the ocean? With ghosts? With electricity illuming the city with so much color?

Never underestimate the fertility of a blackberry vine. The logic of the blackberry vine is indistinct. There’s so much of it. I could make a comparison to the fertility of language. The head of a seal emerges from the water now and then, confirming my suspicion that there is life in the water, and that it is hungry, and that some of it is translucent, and jelly-like, and much of it is quick and supple, and has weirdly led to the evolution of creatures on land, creatures with hair, and limbs that enable them to walk upright, gazing at the water as if it held an answer to the riddle of their own existence.

Right now I’m building a rocket ship. Planet Earth is dying.

Can a pain be ugly or beautiful? I once saw an oyster in a low-cut gown. It made me get in a car and drive. I was mad with energy. I had to tell people. I had things to share. Sensations and feelings, oysters and gowns. I listened to CBS Mystery Theatre under a full moon on I-5 between Redding and San Francisco. I didn’t know where I was headed. Not really. There were friends in San José I was eager to see, sure. But not my overall direction. I was lost in the mystery of my life.

Our cat has an inexhaustible appetite. The tyranny of hunger is enough to bring a government down.

And sometimes I see Mississippi catfish dark and editorial.

This poor old planet has been trashed beyond repair.

Here’s a smear of poetry on a glass side: little microbial words create sugar. A sweetness for the mind. Hormones propel us into trouble. It’s amazing, all the ways the world might enter your head and assume a presence there. The leathery smells of a shoe repair shop. The smell of the sea. The feel of the sky. The labyrinth of halls in an insect. Ever stick your hand in a bucket full of minnows? Anywhere you go nature goes. U2 in Las Vegas, the brushwork of Vincent Van Gogh. The roar of the sun in a turbulence of gold.

People define themselves by what they buy. These charming lights around me are proof of sandwiches. Bubbles in a cave. The whole idea of death, which is prevented by sweaters, and iPods.

The hills of West Virginia are lush and beautiful. Everything else pales by comparison. I can’t get excited by anything in a jewelry store. How do ants manage to work together so flawlessly, to work with such deliberation and drive? What drives ants?

My life is a response to the dramas of the sky. I want to be a hit song in your jukebox. There is a strange kind of quiet that comes with autumn. I think it’s because summer is so noisy. It’s all fireworks and barbecues. Autumn is solemn. We see the return of the sublime. I’m fascinated by the footage of the sunken Titanic. The firmament repeated in your hair. The hypnotic movement of ocean swells. The funny contrast of textures when you’re walking barefoot on concrete and then a thick carpet.

Society is mostly hallucination. Tempers flaring in the Caribbean.

Our apartment is full of books. I have eyes like aquariums. Ecstasy isn’t just a drug. The soil around here insinuates rhubarb. And yet I got stung by a wasp. Should that matter? Is it part of a pattern? Where is Alan Watts?

The world of mushrooms is complicated, like the prostitutes on Aurora. Balloons in the rain. The politics of the fairy tale. One thing I know for sure: there is sublimity in music. The perception of distance is in the stars, the flicker of ancient beginnings, the timeless string of the yo-yo.