A House Along The Highway

Those abandoned homes one often sees along the highways, two-story house, a barn, a copse of trees, those deserted expanses, mostly just sage and sand and a few hills, old barbed wire fence, the posts old and cracked, all of it seemingly harnessed to a past that is still alive, still lingering in the shadows, but that’s the imagination at work, replenishing the non-existent with palaces, fairy tales, parables, lessons for the mind, overflowing as it is with fish and mimosa. That big wide ocean of the head, oceanic consciousness, with a void at its center, a furnace of stars, blast furnace turning ore to iron, iron to steel. This is what happens when travel occupies the day. Nothing rooted, nothing static. Thinking becomes navigation. The smell of sage excites the jelly of the heart. Time to open yourself to the negligence of concentration. Keep the channels open. Focus, but watch the periphery. There’s something to be said for the pragmatists. They know how to carry a hammer. If words are nails, the keyboard is a hammer, although it more closely resembles a piano, which makes notes rather than nails. You can build things with notes just like you can build things with nails. Notes will hold a melody together or make a nice arpeggio. The technology is there to create expression out of sound, a sonnet out of silence, and if we enter the cave, the magic gets stronger. The tools there are darkness and vision. Darkness leads to vision. Odors and gases rise from the fissures and pump prophecies out of us. Words rush out in a great disorder. I welcome the gift of time and space in a swoon. Yes, swoon. Nobody uses the word swoon much anymore. But I do. The coarser daubs contain a burst of colors. The intensity of such things leads to worms and rubies. The primacy of the sentence. A house along the highway.