MAY 2021
“what it comes down to is this. if you don’t understand your feelings, you’re pulled around by them all your life.”
watching the babies in the backyard and the uncompromising, delirious joy of child’s-play
wisteria from the garden in low-cloud strands
I think of the image brought into my room
Of the sage and the thin young man who flickers and asks.
He is asking about the moment when the Buddha
Offers the lotus, a flower held out as declaration.
“Isn’t that fragile?” he asks. The sage answers:
“I speak to you. You speak to me. Is that fragile?”
and then she enters with roses
a proustian way of the past holding on and very much living in the seeming solid-ness of objects
eating a coconut ice cream in the rain
how such magnificent depictions of loss remind one of its circuity, its unbearable, steadfast nature which we nevertheless commit ourselves to when we love—thus how magnificent is love?
sending john koethe poems to william and in this way the words accumulating between us speaks to the greater theatre of language as it enacts and re-enacts intentions, duplicities, multitudes, and all in all the endless cascade of transformations
“Yet what
Troubles me is just the way what used to be a world
Turned out, in retrospect, to be a state of mind,
And no more tangible than that.”
feeling, as ferrante wrote, the books read into the book I held by those before me, who had understood differently
miho hatori and the dizzying delight of her seemingly distant voice
looking into the horizon as a necessary division
swimming scent of lilacs delighting to initiate into weather the sense of summer coming
the joyous excess of celebration counting on, for these moments, the lack of fear, which takes the forms of girls dancing into the oddest corners of the night
truths which hold you captive—the granting of love, the taking of love, that which invents the self into being. my mama’s laugh which unfurls in ringlets. calling me baby in chinese, which no one else does
yellow scent, unchangeable, of lemons
the wine-sweet saturday filled with shores of pines, perfume of apples, and the grand rest-unrest of being on the road, going somewhere, then being on the road, going home
max richter’s elated dreaminess of music as a vehicle to a different state
“of the things we fashioned for them that they might be comforted, dawn is the one that works.”
jean mohr’s (romantic) photographs of the cow herder, which seem more than anything a still life of labour as a way to learn the world
the romance of american communism, and thinking of this conviction that beholds with the very understanding of goodness, of how there exists these systems of ideas to explain to people that their lives do belong to them, and samely how often these ideas can be enraged into devastation, even as they startle within the soul the greater human will to be with and of one another
reality a dream
long, dusty steps leading up to my mama’s home redolent with a newly cared-for blooming
the “primeval hunger” to live a life with meaning
listening, and the memory building itself in procession, swelling with the ornaments of the present
in sherwood anderson’s words, “the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood.”
that incredible, ecstatic, personal triumph in that last musical moment of dead pigs
frank bidart told us that what we love is our fate
patient, sleepless, silent nights
“Do I love it now? Will I ever surprise myself again?
There used to be a time here
on this same earth
where people could taste the sugar inside an orange
only once in a handful of years.
Let’s go back to this emotion—fruit as delicacy. When stillness was.
When people loved with no broadcast.”
sending my cast into the great ripe sea of poetry as we speak to each other from all-various places of the world
