So excited I forgot to title….! what good reading does…

I discover an unconquerable urge to convey this text to you, and a bewildering chance in hell to accurately do so.  This book, My Life by Lyn Hejinian, classified as…huh, what would it be classified as?  There is no designation on the title or copyright pages, I have no idea where a big-box bookstore might shelve the thing…reading through one’s hunch is fiction, no, memoir, no, poetry, no, philosophy, no, literary theory, no…WRITING.  It is one of those texts where words moving through hands like moving water (ever so hard to look away from) seem to form patterns on their own, but one knows there are so many ingredients and influences, substances and material going into the way a wave, a runnel, a current forms….that it cannot be chalked up to chance.  And so you immerse.  You join the river, jump into the water to get a feel.  Swim through it, splash.  Thunk your cupped hands to make thunder.  Float on your back like a dream.  Enjoy.  Explore.  Become with the flow.

Lyn Hejinian has been writing a long time.  I felt stupored by her recent book of a thousand eyes, thinking she just gets better with time, but that’s not so either.  Nothing is true, everything might be.  Hejinian fills her pages with words that seem so unobstructed, so flooded with their possibilities and yet ever so economical, spare, necessary.  They leap like the slap of stream plashing sizable rocks, and then swoon in loop toward a bank.  There is a “miracle” quality, by which I mean to designate that happening of the mind and body when encountering something not-it (unselfsame) and experiencing all sorts of “i am’s” and ‘that’s me’s” – resonances, foreknowledge, understanding, sympatico – nothing we can point to as real – but stuff we really experience all the same.

It’s a wandering flood.  Yes, we do not doubt it’s “her life,” filled with details and colors, textures and senses that only come through first-hand, subjected/ive experience…and yet, nothing secret or private, nothing that hasn’t become language by now – through the book – through its writing – so we know it belongs to all of us.  It is words.  It is water.  It is my life, however one brings themselves to it, to this, to her writing, to what’s written.

A brief example will give you the best idea.  Picking a random five pages (each section is 1.5-2 pp long) I will copy the sentences that strike me (remembering that they only strike me via how they’re arranged with the sentences I’m NOT copying all around them), to give you a sense of how dense the bursts of profundity are, meshed and woven like the songs of birds.  Just that distinct.  Here goes:

“We never wanted more than something beginning worth continuing which remained unended.”

“In order to understand the nature of the collision, one must know something of the nature of the motions involved – that is, a history.”

“After crossing the boundary which distinguishes the work from the rest of the universe, the reader is expected to recross the boundary with something in mind.”

“I came to depend on my children socially, was never at a loss without them.”

“It is hard to turn away from moving water.  And my memory of him is a poor likeness – like jealousy, which cannot get what love has secured.  The fear of ‘losing’ ideas objectifies knowledge.”

‘I want to be free of you, in order to do things, things of importance which will impress you, attract you, so that you can be mine and I can be yours forever.”

“The general form tends to grow quite naturally under the hand that writes it, but until a thing is completed, it needs to be explained.”

“The difference between empathy and responsibility.”

and so on… Now sentences are easily plucked from the text, because it feels like a collection of phrases.  Unrelated.  Ever relating.  And so it builds and twists and floods.  But it is not random.  There are identifiable phrases and reverberations of phrases that keep you from feeling surrealism or some stream-of-individual-consciousness befuddlement.  You don’t have to “go with it” and hope it will come clean…you pursue it and let it push you, this give-and-take and rest-and-urge that weaves you into the text and the text deep into you (often bypassing awareness), much as you imagine the text came to be (in relation to author).  So those sentence/segments/phrases above are pulled from three or four contiguous sections two-thirds of the way through the book, I could’ve started anywhere and found just as many, and with re-readings would choose the sentences sitting between them (I’ve no doubt).

And that is worth reading.  And being read with.  By.

Writing: Chapters that don’t belong – all of them, so far

Here is what has assembled so far…seems like a sort of series…in its wayward way…

 

 

 

 

WRITING:

CHAPTERS THAT DON’T BELONG

“The pen asks / much more than it can answer / one word at a time”

Philip Levine

 

“(the world is like a comparison – / the second part elusive),”

Arkadii Dragomoshchenko

 

“An other is a possibility, isn’t it”

Lyn Hejinian

 

“Consciousness is always consciousness of something”

Larry Levis

 

 

1.  “wake up, snare-setter, / in the snare / spacious, like chance” (Arkadii Dragomoshchenko)

 

And sometimes I do, wake up.  St. Sebastian pinned as a still-life with crystal lances, a clarity.  But that is catching too, and refracts.  “I think that what I thought when I was thinking that, at least in thinking of it now, I am thinking that I thought it…” and so on.  Crystal lances.  Thoughts refracting.  The occasional conviction.  (Which we call certitude).

The margins within margins, windows in reflection.

Every image being an entrance through which we exit.  From.

 

I call this “letting actually resonate.”  This being, activity, thinging we do.

If I stand still, so to speak, I form a spiraling vortex, an enormous vacuum.  What is: portal and Black hole every now.  With.

Prepositions being ever-so-important, say “sign-ificant,” that they deserve their own sentencing.

 

I’ll never know what it is “to write.”  If only because it questions.  Every word.  In.

I can think of it as a working, out, but that is far from any truth I can conceive.  “the second part elusive” with each toggle of a term.

 

Gravity enforcing force, to fly.

I’ve never been fond of violence, but how else might we change?  Or even move?  On.

 

A recent well-organized text I perused and then ate, mentioned dialetheia as a two-way truth; or, “true contradictions,” that is, in one.  Word.  Split with a twin.  Comparison as congenital doubling.  Of difference.  Equals such same.

 

We look toward what can be seen.  Compromised and concealed by a frame.  Otherwise unseen.  Learn, therefore, (through your senses), in-visibility.  Dialetheia.

We do (many of us) love to be astonished, after all.  With.

 

If there are more parts to this I haven’t found them.  They’re either too large or too small.  I’ll have to wait.  I’m unable.  Nothing living waits.  Patience is pretense, pretend.  Waiting, is searching; patience, is longing.  Loss is implicit.

 

2.  The Chorus

“As for we who ‘love to be astonished’…

…A pause, a rose, something on paper implicit in the fragmentary text”

(Lyn Hejinian)

            Explicitly.

I.e. “the loss was always implicit as the longing” (Alain de Botton).  And I quote, quoting from someone else’s quotation, but I forget which (or whose).  For.

I’m certain for various reasons.  Which beggar the certainty.

A pause, arose, and fragmented this text.

Because I don’t

know

what I’m

doing

I am writing,

and it questions.

            As if we could get intimate with our process, so near it as to join.  In other words, if our action, breathing, effort, language, thinking, senses and the uncountable inborn “blind spots” that a human system circulates were, well…coterminous.

 

Is that a question lacking its mark?

It would seem so.  About.

Either too large or too small, perceptively, I suspect.

Causing a pause to rise,

as I search for something implicit.

            Explicitly.

 

Given the fragmentary text(s) (you agree?) I have to ask:  might writing be possibling an other?  “Consciousness is always consciousness of something” (he said).

That is a possibility, isn’t it?  (the second part’s elusive),

 

Blatantly – I feel caught in a snare I am setting, as spacious as I imagine chance to be, (having no other name I can call it), ensnared as I seem – some web, some matrix, some universe and beyond – too large or too small to perceive (I am guessing)

which always gives rise to a pause, implicitly.

What I had hoped to make explicit.

 

What I call “wanting actually resonate,” some loss implicit as longing.

I write, asking more than it answers, or “the closer the look one takes at a word, the greater the distance from which it looks back” (Karl Kraus, which I quote off someone else, who knows who – yet I hope someone does!)

 

“But of any material, the first thing to make is an ash-tray”

(Lyn Hejinian, I quote this text from its source,

apparently).

 

 

3 – ?

“’Appearances / remain suspended / in transmission’ (Craig Watson) are not so much perceived as apprehended, handled; the one affecting, infecting, the next”

(Charles Bernstein)

 

            Or something to hold what dies off.  The reverberations without resonance.  All edited, edited out, according to needs for appearance, depending on what apprehends, the shape of the handler’s snare.

Think of it – what is selected for capture, in captivity, infects, slipping frequencies to drift on, transmitting, transmitting, there is always ash that won’t be removed, no amount of soaking, scrubbing or spray…

perhaps it’s under the nails, clogging the pores, dusting the follicles… the remains.

We don’t know why we write, trusting such ephemeral weightless shifty particles to catch as motes in an eye…appearances, like dust (in just the right angle of light), remaining suspended in their transmission…hoping (without, really, hope) to, in apprehension – apprehend, by being handled to affect, infect…

always wanting next.  Making it so.

Depending.

 

Why the book is needed (as ashtray) as form to hold the crumbling, an urn for the remains, until such time as they might be stirred or shaken or spilled.

Again in the commerce of bodies, handled, brushed and staining.

It gets everywhere.  And remains.

Note its infective spread.

Language, whether structures/systems of, or fragments – bits and pieces, lying everywhere implicit.

To write – to make explicit?  It asks more than it answers, word by word, by letter, by ash…

 

And what remains?  Suspended…in transmission…for affect…a dormant virus…waiting to be breathed…

 

4.  Desiring Reality

“the loss was always implicit as the longing”

-Alain de Botton-

“But, no one / can tell without cease / our human / story, and so we / lose, lose”

-Li-Young Lee-

“[Writing] is born from…’dissatisfaction’ – an internal void provisionally filled by the achievement of expression”

-Eugenio Montale-

“Because [writing] mediates between the requirements of desire and the conditions of reality, and because the relation between the two keeps changing, no statement of that relation is final”

-Ronald Sukenick-

“What is important…is not a word that is a stable and always self-equivalent signal, but an always changeable and adaptable sign”

-Katerina Clark / Michael Holquist-

 

I desire to write.  I think of it, at times, as an inscribing of thought, a physical processing of emotions, subconsciousness, dreams and ideas…”thought is a form of grief…but think we do, and lament we must, because lose we will” (H.L. Hix).  “But no one can tell without cease our human story…” ashes accumulating, carried by arbitrary winds, dissolved in sand and sea…

“Lose, lose” and don’t want to lose (desire); my ‘not-wanting’ is my longing (implicit loss), in other words “what memory is not a gripping thought?” (Lyn Hejinian)…imagination grasping in desire what it does not want to lose…forming an ashtray.  For what it loses.  Implicitly.

“No statement of that relation is final.”  Even, then, obviously, that statement.  Therefore we long to apprehend and handle…capture and contain…frame and represent…to ourselves (for?), for one another (to?) reality as it is not-known to us, unstable, uncertain and always changing.  Remember?

This is what makes this “fiction,” a “novel” – some new telling and unique ashtray design, in search of the fluttering ash, the “changeable adaptable sign.”

Required by desire, conditioned by unstable and unceasing reality, I write…words asking more than they answer, the dissatisfaction(s) (losses implicit in the longing) ever ephemerally, temporarily, momentarily filled by the action, the thought, the attempted expression (inscription) and then immediately felt again (affected, infected).  The plot, the narrative, the characters, all bound up right there – in the next moment’s void.  A gripping thought.  I give pursuit.  I desire.

I write.

 

5.  Without Trace

 

At the liminal edge, porous, moist, invisible and insensible arc…imagined limit, threshold…the ache to enter, with nothing to penetrate; the yearn to cross over or through, yet there is no barrier.  Simply following the pen, without copying.

Another way to say “possibility becoming,” or “questions and answers are words,” “letting actually resonate.”  The next part elusive, but its begun.  Refusing to compare.  Forging-foraging-forgery.

I am writing.  An other possibility that must be consciousness of something, perhaps implicit in the fragments, without identifiable trace because ensnared in the traces.

What is fiction, or poetry, essay / memoir / treatise…because making, with usable words.  That toggle so, and displace.  That render in their sundering.  That make a difference…by comparison, where the “other” is not known.

Assuming a tracing could follow or draw.  Like that – following lines or leading them on.  The perceptions, scratch that, apprehension or handling the senses must do when the look, feel, hear, smell, touch; the loss inherent in the transmission to thoughts, fueled by the desire to grasp or retain.  What was never suspended.  Always in transmissive motion…the letters.

If the lines are drawn effectively…I may form a working receptacle (as they falsify and crumble behind me in the ongoing change) where the ashes might be held.  Am I getting the picture?  Taking it?  Is taking it the same thing as making it?  Or must I develop it too?  The pen asking so many questions, word after word, tracing an image, a setting, a how…Will you follow?  Will I?  Will this be called writing and reading?  “Literature”?

I create without trace in the traces.  I go on.  Each word a threshold, a bottomless pit, then beyond that…again.

Like stringing the line and entangled.  Hooked for life…which is death.

Asking synonyming answers.  And vice-versa.  Just words.

 

I am writing.

finally finding a little poetry…been kinda dry lately

Spoondeep

How Does the Artist See

 

that I carry

like the heaviness of a pack

on my body

the incalculable weight

of my loving her

needing support

for the imbalance

reaching out

to ordered objects

as a result

of a knee

that was bad

from the get-go

and bites at every bending

chained as it is

to my enormous hoary head

full and sprouting tangly thoughts

so that I face in all directions

begging mercy

of these stocks

that I create

N Filbert 2012

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Friday Fictioneers: “The Brambles”

Another failure…I nearly doubled the word count ’cause he wouldn’t shut up.  Probably shoulda aborted it, but here it is:

raspberry

The Brambles

He was painting a picture for us.  “Now this takes significant time to develop,” he said, “but I promise it’ll be worth the wait.”  “The fruits, they aren’t easy pickings, but if you’re willing to work it, I mean really get in there and give it a go – you’ll find ‘em, and they,” he assured us, “even these beautiful berries, nuggets, sweet bloody fleshes can seem prickly and tart at the first – it’s kind of an ‘acquired taste’ as they say – from years and years of this trying/acquiring and trying/acquiring – but those tiny pert jewels, held deep ‘round the heart of its center, those phenomenal pearls of good juice, as they finally give way and pop open,” he said, “that rush!  That momentary flood of powerful delight, that untangleable blend of most delicate morsel and sun-bittered time, that salting of aging and ripeness – it’s a wonder!”  “You’ve just got to get to them and find them, one after one and by one, have persistence!” he admonished, “far along, deep within, there’s always this unbelievable cluster of most amazing, unique and mouthwatering reward – yes, it seems tiny and ephemeral and difficult to grow or achieve, but it’s worth it!” he encouraged us, “the dedication of labor and time, constant tending and pruning pursuit; the right balance of trimming and rest, nourishment and fallow…”

Why he’d referred to our marriage as “the Brambles.”

N Filbert 2012

Please join us in these weekly forays!

Friday Fictioneers

Scribbling chapters that don’t belong…part 3

3 – ?

“’Appearances / remain suspended / in transmission’ (Craig Watson) are not so much perceived as apprehended, handled; the one affecting, infecting, the next”

(Charles Bernstein)

 

            Or something to hold what dies off.  The reverberations without resonance.  All edited, edited out, according to needs for appearance, depending on what apprehends, the shape of the handler’s snare.

Think of it – what is selected for capture, in captivity, infects, slipping frequencies to drift on, transmitting, transmitting, there is always ash that won’t be removed, no amount of soaking, scrubbing or spray…

perhaps it’s under the nails, clogging the pores, dusting the follicles… the remains.

We don’t know why we write, trusting such ephemeral weightless shifty particles to catch as motes in an eye…appearances, like dust (in just the right angle of light), remaining suspended in their transmission…hoping (without, really, hope) to, in apprehension – apprehend, by being handled to affect, infect…

always wanting next.  Making it so.

Depending.

Why the book is needed (as ashtray) as form to hold the crumbling, an urn for the remains, until such time as they might be stirred or shaken or spilled.

Again in the commerce of bodies, handled, brushed and staining.

It gets everywhere.  And remains.

Note its infective spread.

Language, whether structures/systems of, or fragments – bits and pieces, lying everywhere implicit.

To write – to make explicit?  It asks more than it answers, word by word, by letter, by ash…

And what remains?  Suspended…in transmission…for affect…a dormant virus…

waiting to be breathed…

the Book of a Thousand Eyes

I have just entered in to another remarkable whorl and world of Lyn Hejinian‘s language.  From the blurbs…”For Lyn Hejinian the concept of ‘everything’ or ‘everything living’ is the greatest seduction.  In this book of tales, poems, polemics, lullabies, treatises, asides…’everything’ is captive to life and continuation is queen…Lyn Hejinian knows that ‘familiarity breeds the predictable’ but she knows as well that – and how – ‘contact produces uncertainty.’  This is a brilliantly uncertain book, a book of fantastic connection, connection as multiple and as hopeless as love might be, connection as big and leggy as the night is long”

And I quote:

“Who can be trusted? / One tells / but cannot recognize.”

“the yearning inherent in the use of any sentence makes it mean far more / than ‘we are here’…

shows with utter clarity how sentences in saying something make something”

“My sentence is garbling grammar to the inside as phenomena change / concentration”

“since the future, like fortune, is to be found not in events but in their / meanings /

The future is fortune’s form /

But it lacks familiarity, the criterion for belief /

But it is real by definition, being unaffected by what we think of it /

The future is an accuracy requiring patience, presence /

We can’t predict if we don’t watch /

Watching makes what comes to be watched”

“It’s not the length of a life but the tension of its parts that lets / resound all that it feels”

“There is nothing unconditional – there is always room – “

and so on…333 pages of dreams and wisdom, language and possible meanings…I recommend

Scribbling chapters that don’t belong…(2)

2.  The Chorus

“As for we who ‘love to be astonished’…

…A pause, a rose, something on paper implicit in the fragmentary text”

(Lyn Hejinian)

            Explicitly.

I.e. “the loss was always implicit as the longing” (Alain de Botton).  And I quote, quoting from someone else’s quotation, but I forget which (or whose).  For.

I’m certain for various reasons.  Which beggar the certainty.

A pause, arose, and fragmented this text.

Because I don’t

know

what I’m

doing

I am writing,

and it questions.

            As if we could get intimate with our process, so near it as to join.  In other words, if our action, breathing, effort, language, thinking, senses and the uncountable inborn “blind spots” that a human system circulates were, well…coterminus.

Is that a question lacking its mark?

It would seem so.  About.

Either too large or too small, perceptively, I suspect.

Causing a pause to rise,

as I search for something implicit.

            Explicitly.

Given the fragmentary text(s) (you agree?) I have to ask:  might writing be possibling an other?  “Consciousness is always consciousness of something” (he said).

That is a possibility, isn’t it?  (the second part’s elusive),

Blatantly – I feel caught in a snare I am setting, as spacious as I imagine chance to be, (having no other name I can call it), ensnared as I seem – some web, some matrix, some universe and beyond – too large or too small to perceive (I am guessing)

which always gives rise to a pause, implicitly.

What I had hoped to make explicit.

What I call “wanting actually resonate,” some loss implicit as longing.

I write, asking more than it answers, or “the closer the look one takes at a word, the greater the distance from which it looks back” (Karl Kraus, which I quote off someone else, who knows who – yet I hope someone does!)

“But of any material, the first thing to make is an ash-tray”

(Lyn Hejinian, I quote this text from its source,

apparently).

Scribbling chapters that do not belong…

1.  “wake up, snare-setter, / in the snare / spacious, like chance” (Arkadii Dragomoshchenko)

 

And sometimes I do, wake up.  St. Sebastian pinned as a still-life with crystal lances, a clarity.  But that is catching too, and refracts.  “I think that what I thought when I was thinking that, at least in thinking of it now, I am thinking that I thought it…” and so on.  Crystal lances.  Thoughts refracting.  The occasional conviction.  (Which we call certitude).

The margins within margins, windows in reflection.

Every image being an entrance through which we exit.  From.

 

I call this “letting actually resonate.”  This being, activity, thinging we do.

If I stand still, so to speak, I form a spiraling vortex, an enormous vacuum.  What is: portal and Black hole every now.  With.

Prepositions being ever-so-important, say “sign-ificant,” that they deserve their own sentencing.

 

I’ll never know what it is “to write.”  If only because it questions.  Every word.  In.

I can think of it as a working, out, but that is far from any truth I can conceive.  “the second part elusive” with each toggle of a term.

 

Gravity enforcing force, to fly.

I’ve never been fond of violence, but how else might we change?  Or even move?  On.

 

A recent well-organized text I perused and then ate, mentioned dialetheia as a two-way truth; or, “true contradictions,” that is, in one.  Word.  Split with a twin.  Comparison as congenital doubling.  Of difference.  Equals such same.

 

We look toward what can be seen.  Compromised and concealed by a frame.  Otherwise unseen.  Learn, therefore, (through your senses), in-visibility.  Dialetheia.

We do (many of us) love to be astonished, after all.  With.

 

If there are more parts to this I haven’t found them.  They’re either too large or too small.  I’ll have to wait.  I’m unable.  Nothing living waits.  Patience is pretense, pretend.  Waiting, is searching; patience, is longing.  Loss is implicit.

 

 

Recently Recovered

Another story I found from a number of years back…still has some oomph I hope….

A Series of Stories about Love

 The first thing that comes to mind is all the breathless tugging.  At clothes, at skin, in her mouth.  The way you squeeze into it, the wiggle and dance, and then you drown.

She told me of her life-dreaming last night, lying in bed.  How she just knew, she really knew, at fifteen or sixteen, her skin first licked by flames, all her dizzy hopes, her victimized newness, those first irisy smelling blooms in her flesh, that she would always love in such a way that men would eat at her, chew her to blood and spit her out.

It didn’t happen this way.  She bought a blender.

And every time, at just the right (or very wrong) time, she stuffed them in, ground them to pulpy bits, and poured them down the drain.  This is my wife we’re talking about.

The blender is out.  The blender sits on the counter.  It’s been four years.

First the sun rises.  Everything warms, your legs glow into coals.  Arms flush with melanin, forehead beading sweat.  Her ears are red.  Your mouth gasps and gulps at the air of the others language.  Someone lights your fuse.  The booster rocket burns away.  A holocaust of flames.

She’s never stayed friendly with a man for so long she says.  She makes a list of what’s necessary to her life.  Your name is not included.  I wonder if the blender is still working.  The right very wrong time is past.  We are nowhere.

I consume alcohol like fields do liquid in drought.  I smoke like an oil field already spent.  I caress and fondle a fuzzy June-bug in my palm.  With my lips.  I tossle my son’s hair.  I cry.  I love everything one way.  Addiction.  Obsession.  My love is a jet turbine (I say), a swallowing vortex, a whale.  My love is neuroses.  You’ve got the wrong each other, the weather says.

First there are nine kinds of electricity.  One for each of the senses.  And they all get plugged in at once.  Except mine were never unplugged.  Rain-powered, blood-powered, keeps going and going and…

I would not have your name tattooed on my body, she says.  Only permanent things, she says.  Like zodiac.  Like turtles.  Like signs for god.

Everything hurts, but we knew that already.

This is my wife we’re talking about.

I have a lazy eye.  It wanders about and falls asleep at random.  Its dreams are split away from the rest of my body.  I blow lightly on the spiders.  I stroke her calf.  I read a line of words down a page and get inappropriately, inexplicably charged.  Most things turn me on.  The turbine has only one speed.  It’s what makes the planets move.  It hurls the moon’s stones.  It fills stars.

The glance of fingertips on arm while walking one night: first strawberry in the mouth.

Strips of fresh mango: her first song.

She will not be overcome.  She fiddles with the blender’s buttons.

We have made children together…

I love mountains.  The sight, smell, rocks of them.  High, cold streams.  I love temperate woods.  The tall soft spike of giant firs.  The drape and droop of their large limbs.  And mermaids.  Salt on liquid skin.  I suffer from addictions.  Rituals.  Habits.  Gas for the turbine.  Sight.

Shoulder.  Tattoo’d calf.  Waistline.  Ankle.

Knuckles on a hand.  Hair over neck, down between shoulder-blades.  Belly buttons.  Crotch.  Wrist.  Veins at the back of the thigh.

Fuel for the turbine.  Touch.  Smell.  Thinking.  Dreaming.

I hear the blender in the kitchen grinding frozen fruit and yogurt.  Bones.  Blood.  I shiver.

“I could not be intimate with you if I didn’t care,” she says.  “It’s 50/50 my like and dislike, my hope and depression.  I want to be in love again, but not out of love again, so I stay.”

(This is my wife we’re talking about.)

“But you should be loved like an engine too,” she says.

Just let the engine run, baby, I say.

Love for a woman is systemic.  Like cancer.

The blender is like chemotherapy.  No one really knows how much it destroys.

Love will destroy you, she implies.

Like alcohol.  Like war.  Like fire.

Maybe we shouldn’t own guns.

But that first day at the range.  The charge of the buckling of your shoulder.  The loudness of the rifle’s shout.  Those sudden bursts.  The sheer power and speed.  You fire, again and again.  You conceal it in your hand.  They live and fill your pockets.

We possess many weapons.

A person is an armory.

She is a turtle mostly, she says.  She carries it all on her back, she says.  She can retract at any time.  Be saved from the flow of hot wind, the battering of sound, and the flood of all at once, if she needs to, she says.

The turbine spins (it’s the size of government buildings), it blows, rages, floods.

We draw letters in the mud.  It dries, cakes, molders.

We set these things in concrete stamps.

We yell permanence.

(The blender is whirring in the kitchen).  Even rock will ground down.

“I have the sense that the meaning of things will never be sorted out,” the poet says.

There is no hope.