An Early Evening In Late March

My considered harm is to be a compass. To greenhouse into mirrors makes the incident olfactory. It is better to sand the swell than sway in tergiversation. My ochre hustles the crust forward, where it might breathe, and become translucent. I write it through the jug. The tension generates us to poke, and to polish the bloom at the lip of its husk. It will always be muscle that herds the aerodrome geese. Elbows help me think. It comes easier when my head is supported by swans. I feel a slipping of the guts after a rain. I rise, and advance by instigation. Movement plays an invaluable role among the goldfish. Jane Austen sits at her desk designing a blowtorch. Tiny languages pelt the window. What to attract to my essential need is a frequent problem. If it isn’t Jane Austen, it must be something else. In order to generate sleep, we do push-ups. We do them on the ceiling. Our wings grow out of the calculations used to explore a feeling. Time and again the words build a mighty grammar. If you give me a baseball bat I will feel it inside this sentence. There are no speed limits within the fourth dimension. Just persuasion, and corollaries. 

Time itself feels suspended. It’s an early evening in late March. Soon to be April. There are repeated volleys of thunder, which hardens the muscle, and precipitates cheese. I do like ataraxia, but this isn’t the weather for that. We put yoga mats on the car windows in case it hails. One must assist that sunlight under the skin or lose it to progress. Even when times were vertical we brushed them with stunning bikinis to make them shine horizontally. Concentrating on the harmonica helps perforate the time. I like the expansion of the concertina more for the radical pleasure of its boil than the gleam of its civility. As for me, I love the sound of thunder. It’s the music of chaos. Crustaceans gaze at a champagne cork. Waves swell, crest, and crash on the shore. I’ve seen it all before. The first light of dawn crawling over the cabbage. The waitress coming to the table with a pot of coffee. The trickle beneath the bronze is sign of fever. Don’t let it confuse you. Just point to the item on the menu and say that’s it, that’s what I want. And if she answers that’s what everybody wants, smile, and shape your voice into a bouquet of snapdragon.

Undulations of any sort arouse my interest. If I swallow the sun when the scales break I can place some candy behind the horizon for entertainment. It’s all about waves. You should structure your door so it may open to a visceral thought. Everything is always so counterclockwise. If you pull hard enough the spirits will quack. I can feel it. Can you? The constant glimmer of details. Have you ever felt like you were standing in a room alone by a window reading a letter? If you can paint the sound of fire you can box a suede syncopation in a humble velocity. I’ve seen such things happen. Palominos crest a hill. Hummingbirds thunder in a courtyard. Howlin’ Wolf walk into Sun Records for the first time. The bohemian universe attacks a dilemma with pullulation and jokes. Notice what a nipple does during nerves. There are indentations on the furniture that brawl in the light when the curtains open. And there are moments when the present fills with the past so intensely they switch places and pluck romance out of the air. The surrounding dystopia retreats into the shadows. And Mary Shelley walks in.

 

Lost In Space

R comes in to tell me the astronauts stranded in the space station for 286 days splashed down near the Florida coast. And I wonder what that felt like to be trapped in space all that time and then touch down on earth and breathe fresh, atmospheric air again. Like that time I went to prison as part of a writer’s group that visited inmates and talked about writing and literature and a few hours later when we exited the prison how lushly detailed and sensuous the world seemed, as if I hadn’t been paying sufficient attention the whole time I’d been alive.

I used to get that feeling in my dad’s workshop when I came home to visit from California. The smell of freshly sawn wood mingled with the shine of chisels and the powwow of pipe clamps on the wall. Even radios sound different in workshops; they sound like a voice healing the language with diction, even though everything said is a lie or a fib or a gross distortion it serves the energy of the language. Because it’s a calliope of nuclear syllables and opens the gate to oxymorons. Sparkling inconsistencies. Haunting mascaraed eyes. West Virginia garage sales. 

We’re used to thinking about space as the setting in which a number can precisely measure the distance between two points. A point in space can be unequivocally characterized as a collection of three numbers (x, y, z) on three axes. It can also be described as a large, roomy pavilion with lattice walls admitting breezes from every quarter of the compass, or the flaming gold sunset over the Columbia river gorge in August, 1988 when Bob Dylan sang “I Shall Be Released,” or that moment in the summer of 1964 when my chute opened and I dangled in the sky, marveling at the Skagit Valley, and the bird flying under me.

The architecture of doubt excites our flapping. We nap in the high vaulted ceilings of the Renaissance. Because we’re bats. And sound the world with radar. I’m pinging off a bank of hills right now, feeling the shape of the landscape, allowing my desires to become music, and echo their elaborate schemes.

Clouds are machines for bringing rain to the earth. We can do that, can’t we? Float. Drift. Clump. Piss on the ground.

I carved the electricity myself, using a jackknife and a rock.

You may have noticed I now wear hearing aids and suspenders. I’m at that age. Timelessness gets embryonic near the promenade. But here it’s just a clock. And embodies a principle of tea.

My intentions tremble in sympathy. This is my seminal ebony, the moment when they wake up the balcony, and we launch ourselves into anonymity, breaking chaos into bits of inertia.

I only use overdrive if I’m captured by the moonlight and have a hard time keeping my eyes on the road and my hands on the wheel. I believe there’s a formula for this. Tools. Exercises. Operations. Procedures. Handsprings. Somersaults. Cartwheels. Walking upside-down on a chair while singing the national anthem. It always works best in the nude. I don’t know why. Some things come alive via the magic of permeation. Being. And the trickle of verisimilitude.

Space is an abstract concept that describes the relationships between objects and the forces that act upon them, and is the framework within which all physical phenomena occur, acting as the "stage" upon which events in the universe unfold. In other words, space is the three-dimensional expanse in which all matter exists. Which is why it’s so easy to get lost in space. There’s so much furniture.

Getting lost is no easy matter. I got lost once with some friends in a forest of eucalyptus near Santa Cruz, California. I can’t remember how we managed to find our way out. Maybe we didn’t. Maybe, in some sense, I’m still surrounded by eucalyptus, imaginary eucalyptus, abstract emissions of sexual syntax which defy mahogany and ramble along in a trajectory of hasty incisions in the fabric of space and time. I can sometimes hear the murmur of stars in a canopy of canvas, bright maniacal colors chained to a linguistic engine in a glimpse of delirium. It could also be the lobby to a hotel in Deadwood, South Dakota. I can often identity a location by the number of chandeliers or the clash between meanings in an allegory of punching bags and sweat.

But please. Let’s not get carried away. Language can only do so many things. It works by magic, we know that, but its movements are similar to that of the Komodo dragon, which uses a variety of libidinal adjectives to describe Cézanne, and can attain a speed of thirty turtles an hour. One would be well served to use language carefully, and with a view toward celerity and chiaroscuro.

Space is to language what language is to clouds. Participles participate in this clasp as it anchors. You can walk over there to greet a Cubist. There, in this context, references a staircase built to resemble the staircase of the Loretto Chapel in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which spirals in 360 degree turns with no visible means of support, and looks like a DNA molecule made of spruce. If you happen to slide into the house of yourself as if by magic, you can always slide back out again if you use a bald excuse and a nearby shrub to use as a prop. Life is essentially theater. We’ve known that all the time, and yet I continually forget my lines, and stub my toe on the magazine stand. My biology does not allow for flying or hanging from the ceiling folded in my wings. I do have a certain position in bed that launches me into hypnopompic carnivals, and echolocation and songs. My more considered view requires a compass, because there is a curve to space, and cranberries and sewing kits. It helps to be experimental. Even better to be in touch.