Sentences Are Thickets

Sentences are thickets. We walk through them gazing at the various gestations, things that arise in the mind and begin to float on its energy, its continuous spurts and sports and spores and speculations, the wildfires of the millennium providing background for a gazillion unmoored thoughts, and one’s thinking gets tangled at the end of the dock, which wasn’t there at first, but now it’s there, extending into the lake the way a line in a Robert Duncan poem might extend into romanticism, and sets the mind free, its scales a fleeting shimmer as it glides into deeper water, and finds jewels and skirmishes, twists of papyrus in an ancient library, and thrives among the symbols. The drift of conversation. Voices echoing in a hall of marble. Pistachios on the ground.

I ask the unyielding Sentence that shows Itself forth in the language as I make it, writes Duncan. This morning I am dunked in Duncan. And find that each sentence that emerges from the power of words to draw more words to their side magnetically, so that an electromagnetic field becomes a self-propagating proposition proportional to the whimsy of a moment, and interacts with the charges and currents of invisible powers such as might exist in a supernal world, a world of metaphor, a world of pinafore and semaphore, and rushes out more words in a stand of reeds.

And so to read a work written by someone Duncan, Stein or Virginia Woolf, is to awaken their thought, pollinate their pistils, stigma, style and ovary, and the rapport flowers into meaning, into image and horse, the hiss of a snake the gloss of a rock. Whatever timber took seed at that time, the time of the writing, the occurrence of words on paper, or in air, or on air, the transmission turns incandescent and lights a room at the back of the mind, and a landscape at the window nibbles at the glass like the branch of a sumac. And the author appears at your table, a jester with bells, and sprinkles the tympanum with twists of syntax, tufts of thought on a stem of glass.