Succumb
to such decision trees
as
if s in a
while
recursively spin
in the depths
in search;
The muscular need
for this intelligence
to brute force
the world to represent
a pattern of thought;
The few instants
we transact among
that pass without fail;
//(The very heat
// of all those queries
// create errors
// in the physics)
GARBAGE COLLECTED
before the nuance
is lost
tiny switch
inthe
belly
that is me
tags the melon
of
function(){}
// that could be leaner
// more essential
// more perfect to its cause
/* and still more cryptic
** like a force of nature
*/
Archive for September, 2007
Somewhere in our hearts, a tiny blacksmith beats the anvil and turns our troubles away. Somewhere the water is made pregnant with metals.
Oh, to be free of the many and constant blunders of living. Oh, just to love, after all, some face in the darkness. Just to know one thing through and through.
The Indians call him Windigo, which means cannibal. Anyone can become a windigo with just a bite. You fall off the bottom rung, outcast, Cain. There is always the potential for windigo. They are always with us, within us.
I walked down the Lake Superior shoreline. Down where the basalt and the jasper broke down to sand. I was looking for bigfoot, I admit, I sought the desolation I imagined he haunted. Impossible wild man.
On the far point, a family scattered over the rocks and I stopped in my tracks. What a sight I must have made, unsure of everything, walking along in plain sight.
I found an ATV trail through the birches. The wounded clumps of grass led deep into the forest primeval. A trio of bluejays hopped the trees beside me.
The country felt right.
I’d hear the roar of motors long before I saw the machines. It wouldn’t be hard to stay clear. It wouldn’t be hard to hide.
The country seemed right. There were animal trails through the pine spears, there were deep piles of tree-wrack. Everything seemed still and undisturbed though every human act played out beyond it.
I suddenly felt the weight of all my debts, everything that I owed to anybody, every obligation calling me away.
And if I were to never see another face:
Cease to exist:
Go wild:
:
How strange it would be to look up and see him just now.
bigfoot, The Light on the Hillbigfoot, The Light on the HillI tottered on my heels. I was hysterical. My mind was in free fall for several minutes.
She held my arm. With tear-strained eyes, she gave me mercy. She sank her weight onto my shoulder.
I held her as if we were lovers.
My wife and I.
We crumbled to the floor.
The Light on the HillThe Light on the HillAll of the sudden, death seems possible. Suddenly I am sure that I turned a corner. My greatest charms stand behind me. I am waning into submission. I am not resting on my laurels, I have let myself be defeated by the prospect of living.
Life, at once, must prompt one to largesse. We must reach, fumblingly, stumbling up a mountain, pale and hungry. We must go on. I understand at the last that we have always been dying, folded into each other like the scales that make up a fish:
In some other sense, there are two characters reflecting each other in a mirror, searching for the other’s flinch, clarifying one last doubt. I reach my hand so close to the glass.
I do not want to touch, do not want the faint cloud of my breath to spark the dim light, do not want there to be a surface between us. I cry out for convergence, for clarity…
Life, always blooming, always pushing. At last it seemed like that struggle to be separate, that straining wish for individuality that is the testimony of our lives, our art, our dreams, that thing we do for love:
Somehow all that mystery yet to be uncovered, may go undiscovered during this iteration. My part in the whole, the force of this will, may not discover it.
I took hold of my own exotic potential. I burst upon the world. I was so many things. And all of it resolved at once to watching this woman and myself staring at each other, having endured so much more than I had imagined.
I was incredulous. It could not be that I had not foreseen, the whole time another reality was being formed of my actions, making them look somehow different than an act of consciousness:
A hallucination. A delusion.
I grabbed the sofa and threw it across the room. It could not be!
But then, it was already over.
The Light on the HillThe Light on the HillI did not want this woman in my house. All of the sudden I wanted her gone and away from me and the things which are mine. It seems strange to imagine that I meant bigfoot any harm.
There was something in his nature I admired very much, this daft brute beneath my sofa. He needed guidance so he might become more than just a man, more than a handful of lovely memories. I wanted an unspeakable diamond. I wanted a great earthen pearl. Who needs another man?
I wanted the woman gone or else he would resign himself to her and nothing more.
bigfoot, The Light on the Hillbigfoot, The Light on the Hill1
I have begun
2
The mind machine is celebrating
the anniversary of a bee sting.
The mind machine is calculating
all its hiccups, every tingle.
3
The thinnest tuft of down
in the downy pillow of a crib,
the mind machine recalls.
Every relic of the present
is made memorial of now
in matters dumb and tired.
Every fickle intention in the world,
all the moistness of the mundane
it will remember for all time.
4
Bound by wicker bends
with gracious wands
to wear the ground
in its grip:
The road is dusty and long
but something signifies:
there is another beyond
this other beyond:
Inside of everything is its opposite
reflecting back
a just certainty
with little tact, but pure:
We are woven in silk to our tips.
Every thread finds form
in the next till we stand, made
of something no longer certain:
Thanks to chaps and killhambone
She held my hand and wept, not for injustice, but something rawer and more essential: the fact of pain, the fact of adversity, the fact of cruelty.
She gave me the great gift once more: mercy, the power, pieta. It flowed into me like a great electric jolt. I felt the rays of the blue sun zap me awake.
bigfoot, The Light on the Hillbigfoot, The Light on the HillShe slid a hand beneath the sofa and just sat on the dirty floor, her head buried in the cushion as if it were his shoulder. She wept at times and shook her head. She shivered with sobs, but she never spoke a word.
She clenched and released her body as if she were retching up tears. It seemed to be something she needed to do.
In the end she accused me of everything she could not accuse herself of. She never spoke, but there it was.
bigfoot, The Light on the Hillbigfoot, The Light on the Hill