First Movement

A music of madmen rearranging furniture in rooms of sound.

The rhythm of things lifted, let down. Muscles tensed and released.

Pause. Are you pleased?

Let's try it differently. But quick, quick, before silence gets home.

Offering

Buckets of silver
light poured into the river
to summon the moon.

Largo

There are days when my happiness depresses me.

***

There is an ugliness to perfection - it is too obvious, too ostentatious. To be beautiful is to be damaged, in subtle and irreparable ways.

Like the wings of the butterfly crushed to pure color. Or the mournful call of the cello that knows itself alone.

Double jeopardy

You can't be thrown into the same river twice.

Water Walking

"to walk
on water as water, demonstrating
that we hardly know under what terms
we perform our sitting in air, our miraculous,
perilous stepping out in the flesh
over the everyday void."

- Tess Gallagher, 'Water Walking' from Dear Ghosts, (Graywolf 2006)

***

Impression follows impression. Nothing sinks in.

An escapist vision: the Resurrection as the first film. The sea a dark negative the light touches and moves on.

Or, as the three wise critics said, a star is born.

A house with everything you've ever dreamt of...

...would be an extremely scary place.

Think of the monsters under the bed, the snakes in the shower, the staircases you couldn't help falling down.

Think of how the floor would constantly trip you, so you'd stumble yourself awake.

***

Have you ever had a fall where it felt like you were dreaming until your face hit the ground?

***

The plane explodes mid-sentence, at the height of a blue morning. I look up and the sky is filled with cogs. A propeller comes spinning down, like a lethal tumbleweed, bounces off the road, smashes into the house.

Unsleeping Ghost

You return to loss the way one returns to a bed one has slept in, long ago, as a child.

Amazed that your body still fits within its dimensions. Tempted to pretend you never left.

Meditation

I quiet the voices inside my head, listen to the silence around me.

The Puddle

Toss the moon in a puddle and it becomes a coin.

Someone has run the puddle over. It lies by the roadside, eyes wide open, ripples opening and closing like a mouth that has something to say.

Evaporating confessions.

Tomorrow it will be impossible to tell a damp spot from your shadow, your forgetting from my past.

Intelligent design

The fact that we can find pattern in the Universe is proof that existence is man-made.

Would a supremely intelligent being be satisfied with anything less than true randomness?

Not here forever

"If you were to enter the room now and say: 'I am leaving for a long time, forever' - or: 'I don't think I love you any more' - I would not, I believe, feel anything new: each time you leave, each hour that you are not here - you are not here forever and you do not love me."

- Marina Tsvetaeva, Earthly Signs

***

It finally happened. You left. Just as I always feared you would. All those business trips when I was so sure you weren't coming back.

So why is it that now that you've finally left I keep expecting you to walk through that door?

The Promenades of Euclid

Rene Magritte

Aspiration

Inspiration

What it reaches

Where it leads

A mirror held up to

A glass through which we see

Geometry

Transcendence

Above

Beyond

More evidence that I'm a sociopath

"At one point, Jackson showed Gregory Exhibit No. 60—a photograph of an Iron Maiden poster that had hung in Willingham’s house—and asked the psychologist to interpret it. “This one is a picture of a skull, with a fist being punched through the skull,” Gregory said; the image displayed “violence” and “death.” Gregory looked at photographs of other music posters owned by Willingham. “There’s a hooded skull, with wings and a hatchet,” Gregory continued. “And all of these are in fire, depicting—it reminds me of something like Hell. And there’s a picture—a Led Zeppelin picture of a falling angel. . . . I see there’s an association many times with cultive-type of activities. A focus on death, dying. Many times individuals that have a lot of this type of art have interest in satanic-type activities.”

from David Grann's incredible must-read piece in this week's New Yorker.

Walking on the beach

"The complete concurrence of souls requires the concurrence of the breath...for people to understand one another, they must walk or lie side by side."

- Marina Tsvetaeva, from Earthly Signs (translation: Jamey Gambrell)

***

You set your pace by the ocean, I matched my step to yours.

We talked of ice cream and sunsets, and how to tell a castle from a mound of sand.

Meanwhile the tide withdrew to a distance, and the waves snickered among themselves.

Cerro Blanco

Because it is there.

An emptiness surrounded by space. A silence from which the lines radiate.

Neither source nor center, it is a surrender of coordinates, the held breath of a horizon between feeling and music, dark earth and air.

Things come together. Anarchy cannot hold.

Passing time is noise, eternity merely volume; after the end and before the beginning there is only this - a balance that is destroyed in being established.

Like the difference between white and blank, invisible and transparent,

long ago and far away.

Of the night for the morrow

Love: to recognize something as necessary and know you can never have it.

If our ideas about death are romantic, it is because we are mortal.

Affirmation

"I have never clogged myself with the praises of pastoral life, nor with nostalgia for an innocent past of perverted acts in pastures. No. One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes--I can't even enjoy a blade of grass unless i know there's a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life. It is more important to affirm the least sincere; the clouds get enough attention as it is and even they continue to pass. Do they know what they're missing? Uh huh."

- Frank O'Hara, 'Meditations in an Emergency'

P.S. To the owners of the Kalahari Resort Convention Center and Kosmix shawls. Dudes, get a clue. Seriously.

The Source

Afterwards, the experts would study the blast pattern, sift through the rubble. Eventually, they would trace the explosion back to its source, here, by this vegetable stall in the crowded market.

The thought made him smile. He'd always wanted to be the center of attention.

Your own end

All night you sit in the dark, the gun ticking at your temple.

Every goodbye is a compromise. If you could explain how you were feeling you would not need to do this. And yet your suffering is as ordinary as newsprint, and you want to pretend you are not in love with death, that you are just using her.

Not judgment after death, but a death that does not judge.

Best baby pictures EVER

I am awed. Truly awed.