“What to write on the blank sheet of paper, already blackened with every conceivable handwriting?  Choose, why choose?”

-J.M.G. LeClezio-

“I speak now and shelter in the tent of language or writing”

-Michel Serres-

Choose.  Why choose?

Deep in love

the sight, the thought, the feel.

Look around.

 

Over here a line comes singing, her misting whispers, behind the ear.

Bold graffiti in the midst: the faces, the lettering.

Trilling of a baby’s babble.

 

Choose.  Why choose?

I build my shelter, I fashion my tent of language.

I might hide here.  I might scribble the wall.

Curving words, like celanic, like ocean.

 

I choose.

Why choose?

To shelter, to bloom.

I build a barn of story, the structure to hold it in.

 

This body, its experiences.

This wife, and hers.

Seven starling children, darting out and in.

And things: stuff, books, ideas, smells.

Dreams and hopes; fears and memory.

Do words burn?

 

I make a sprinkler, and a hose.  I fill them with water.

There is a fire there.  For warmth.

 

To build a well.

I am speaking tools.

Choose.  Why choose?

 

To erase disease-words, and plight.

She says color and I leave it on the walls.

Call and response, they’re in, through the windows.

 

I sing a night with rain.

I sculpt a bed of vowels.

We cry out in the form of wings:

 

Take shelter.

And choose.

Why choose?

 

“There seem endlessly those situations of particular experience wherein one knows and doesn’t know, all at the same instant, which is to say, the information is inherent, actual, in the given system, but (itself a word of this qualification) we cannot step out of its context to see ‘what it is’ we thus ‘know.’”

-Robert Creeley-