Blue Pompom

What wealth of vision there is in a blue pompom. If we went below to talk about an elephant, would there be a problem? Our sense organs filter the outer world as it permeates our being, but they can be persuaded to relax their governance. That’s how I met your mother, when she was dancing with Fred Astaire. Do you remember the day President De Gaulle held you on his shoulders and declared that the Bordeaux government was illegitimate and that he was the true representative of France? You laughed so hard you peed on him, thus altering forever the course of our planet. There are some things in life so hard to accept that it becomes a crisis. A very sweet and crumbly crisis, but powerful enough to pulverize the sternum. They happen every day, these gestures of appeasement, these desperate gymnastics for things we can’t control, things we can’t pull back into language, the place they began, before they turned wild, and ornery, and created all this paraphernalia, this nest in the badlands, where we brood our young in reverie.

Despair is a science. The search for stupefaction grants it a reprieve until one’s wings grow back. To understand these things we must leave the circle of appearances and enter the parallelogram of shadows. We must iron our shirts. We must learn the Monster Mash. I like throwing balls at walls. It helps me feel abstract. These northern seas are freezing. But the horizons are wide. And golden. When the horn is blown we jump to our oars and make things happen. What is poetry for if not to revise the blundering truth? A few of us have returned to paganism for that very reason. Eternity precedes us, eternity follows us. And so we row faster and faster and make discoveries of ourselves in the slop of the waves. Our despairs become phosphor, our words become salt.

We dream of singing in the spring. We spring into singing dreaming of spring. The rear admiral is straining his reason. The excitement mounts as we sail into the mystic. Those faint markings of Cy Twombly thicken in the mind with complexion. I remember the marks made by mail hampers on a certain wall in the old bakery building that was repurposed into a mailing service. It said Cy Twombly, although Cy Twombly had nothing to do with it. A parable has been concocted to restore Makauwahi Cave. For even though all knowledge begins with experience, it by no means follows that all arises out of experience. Some things arise from opium. Percepts of the world are structured by time and space. Though I’ve seen enough preludes to know an extract from a tesseract. Many things serve the world description. Gerunds, and the warm attachment of bonds, twirl in perfumes. Would you like a wolf spider? It’s a way of introducing oneself to imagery.

I entrust my musty introversion to the algebra of the moment. Each minute is equipped with the best compulsions money can buy. What is the skull but a sphere of shadows? We walk in exuberance craving the original world at the end of my finger. I think you know what this means. Property is theft. We strike suddenly when we feel arabesque. But this isn’t the time for that.  Look into this viewfinder, tell me if this doesn’t stimulate your sense of trigonometry: Cézanne staring at a tennis net, fascinated by the shadows it makes. We live in a rainbow of chaos. One adapts by watercolor. Engorge yourself with variation, & fissionable isotopes. Read poetry. Refine your escape into nothingness. Things are as they are, or aren’t. I feel increasingly tangible, as if I lived in a house of language, and the windows were open and the fridge was crammed with beer, & so became a biting commentary on the status quo. For which language was not intended. As if I knew. I’m just another fish in the ocean who has never seen water.

Rain and rain and more rain represents what the beginning might have begun when it began to begin. It’s the closest thing I have to a tattoo. Except for Groucho Marx teasing a flamenco dancer. My God water is wonderful when you’re thirsty. Every day I spent in Kauai I gazed into infinity. It broke my brain into a million gazebos. I can see infinity but I can’t think infinity. Infinity is thoroughly unthinkable. And so I turn to the Bee Gees and their illustrious career. I know my frame of mind. You ain’t got to be so blind. Words are residue. This sweetens the proposition. Experience without thermodynamics is bloodcurdling, but thermodynamics without experience is mere introspective popcorn. So here I am, reaching out for a house in the rain.