Enthusiasmos

I think of North Dakota and look for a letter from my father. The snow speaks to the trees in powdery whispers. The drawer is overflowing with letters. Manuscripts. Submissions. Rejections. Proofs.

I remember that little lake in the Turtle Mountains. It was too small, too common to have a name. If I had the right words, I could lift it into reality and show it to people. The universe isn’t entirely in my head. There is no boundary that begins and ends at my skull. A skull is just a skull. The stuff inside is amazing, but has its limits, until the limits dissolve, and the universe comes flooding in.

They say the sun is a nuclear reactor fusing hydrogen atoms into helium. I have no reason to doubt that. But isn’t the sun also a star? An angel of heat and light?

I don’t remember the last time I saw a circus poster. That era seems to be over, thank God.

What we have now is more puzzling. People in trances gazing at smartphones. The Great Barrier Reef dying. Oceans dying.

The camber of the road is a tumescence for the rain.

Helicopters and mollusks pursue different objectives, but are otherwise ideas based on common sense, on physics, on extraordinary principles of mathematics.

The odors of summer are different than the odors of winter. The odors of Dakar are different than the odors of Denver.

I know a man named Noah who lives in Denver.

I know a man named Ron who lives in New York.

I see a large Russian woman in a bikini teaching Pythagoras.

Dispersal occurs naturally in locution. The erection of beams, the pouring of cement.

I’ve been following the construction of a building at the base of the hill. It’s a colossal enterprise. Everything carefully measured, carefully placed, hoisted by crane then slowly brought down, men in yellow helmets whistling, signaling, waving.

What is energy, energy is a pile of dirt. I have memories of dirt. Some of them good, some of them bad. Some of them weeds, some of them flowers. I know the smell of dirt, the feel of dirt, the power of dirt. Images of wheat rustling and waving in the hills of the Palouse.

Decomposition is a chief cause of composition. There can be no composition without decomposition. They say the sickly odor of a dead python is what led the Greeks to name the high priestess of Apollo’s Temple at Delphi Pythia. The Pythia was widely credited for her prophecies by being filled by the spirit of the god, or enthusiasmos, from whence comes our word ‘enthusiasm.’

The bowl, any bowl, accommodates space inside and out. The skull is a bowl. The skull is a sphere of bone.

And what is thought? Is it a pin or a nail? Is it a hammer? Is it sod? Is it a clump of dirt?

I think it’s a clam squirting water from its siphon. I think it’s Iceland. I think it’s a package of new underwear. A species of space. Manolo Millares. Materialistic informalism.

Spoons. Metaphors. Latitude. The brain is a forge. But the puddles are upside-down, and the world desires our communion.