08.31.2005

Voices inside do not exist without words
Words are wrestled out of time, nothing owns them

08.30.2005

The moment you realize you are seen is the moment the world is born
If all time is eternally present/All time is unredeemable — T.S. Eliot

08.29.2005

Arrangements decay, seasons tip, mortality's just, and timely for some
Darkness of hope: it lends light only to abstraction, and accelerates it

Phony pony paltry party puppy pussy pearly pleurisy plenty Pliny
Ten million ergs make a joule and equal the force of one newton

08.28.2005

Dreams of possible possibilities
Dreams of unfinished business

He never cleared the dreams out of the way
Her private research project — categorize dreams

An earlier bluing of the sky, yellow elm, brownish ash leaves
Whole city could be inundated by tidal surge, or by metonymy

08.27.2005

Imagination is private or public or both
Does language betray or preserve privacy?

Every statement is an experience
An experience is not a statement

Each public thing is also private
The private need not become public

Language creates sides
People take sides

Public: certain words will always get you in trouble
Private: there are no words that will redeem you

Words are a matter of faith; speech is an act
Living in language is an act of faith

Everyone is going to die
No one understands eternity

08.26.2005

Imagined: after weeks and weeks of fog a clear morning
Actual: finally a clear morning says the season's changed

The waning of summer is sadder than the fact of autumn
Spring mind, summer mind, winter mind — last acquired, autumn mind

08.25.2005

Palm|pine avocado|apple redwood|liquidamber — integrated trees here
Cameras installed to capture catastrophe and detailed context

08.24.2005

Limber lumber trees bend their summer ease
Last chance fat pants can't prance sans lance

Lonely going down to oblivion. And cold too. Yes, cold
Lonely Lord, if you deliver me now I'll remember you happily homely

08.23.2005

Stored in a Frigidaire
Cooked on a Wedgwood

Memory loves company
Knot knowing ends many entanglements

Fog dogs lawn swans muck ducks rail snails
Drip trees striptease little-ease more please

To see the woulds and shoulds he had to limber up
The President wedged war to defend himself

08.22.2005

He collapsed in the crowd, all but unnoticed until she screamed
Unstoppable screams, as if to protest how unremarkable death is

08.21.2005

The book makes its own time
To be in a book is to be in a separate time

A story is its own time
To be in a story in a book multiplies time

Seems thought seems seen seems blue seems green is time
Life shapes time; consciousness imagines time

08.20.2005

The heavy light mantles the high sky
The light light hovers above the lake

08.19.2005

Nothing brings back time
Memory parses loss

Preventive maintenance leads to imprecision
Earth maintains itself; words maintain time

Futility of plain recognition addresses the moonlit lake
Cool moon-bright air chained to the smell of warm pine-bark

Words create borders, enabling things to take sides
Looking is labor, words are capital, negative capability the catalyst

An unstoppable stirring along the shore calls for language
Earth babble and starlight are what words talk back to

What you understood without words, the poem confirmed
Happiness is the light that lets you look into life and love it

08.18.2005

smooth lake | smooth mountain | jagged mind
marked metal | body recumbent | lightning

08.17.2005

Tree: I only stand and grow so what do I know?
Wind: You know you are you are you are you do

Myth: same as the original, but unknown to time
History: words and time interpenetrate

Infinitive for existence: to be
Infinitive for time: to everything

08.16.2005

On the windy lake, every early wavelet's a blazer
Odd to think sunset's the centerpiece of daylight

Fish twists in its talons as the osprey tilts to land in its snag
Shrill grammar of songless predator bird plummets through air

By day moonlight longs for the lapping lake
All day you leaked out midnight's love

08.15.2005

In the hot zone, no dial-tone — an eye sees but the heart says own
Hotter and hotter and all around us more and more less and less

And zero at the bone — Emily Dickinson
Zero at white core — Ronald Johnson

08.14.2005

Deliver deliver deliver swells the cadence of the dock
Knock knock knock clonks the float of the boat

My other voice is a sigh
I'd rather be translating

08.13.2005

I totally want it she said, and she did — totally
All the small ways a body is — injunction, conjunction, meditation

08.12.2005

As per the code, emotion foams in a cul-de-sac
Able to leap tall buildings, but useless as wax gears

08.11.2005

Rain holds all the broken words’ plink-plink blank to earth
Stare at the drought of an empty page — nothing’s a shoo-in

Accordingly, summer works toward reunion with rain
Up ‘til two, up ‘til three, up ‘til four in a threadbare bed

08.10.2005

Situation: culture of nostalgia and bombast
Response: summer of Bombay Sapphire & tonic

08.09.2005

Words recede into eternity
Logos is peripatetic

A mountain is millions of years
A word is infinite

Words hide everything and reveal everything
Each word is promiscuous, precise and faithful

08.08.2005

Each word is rooted in no place
The absence in words is kin to the gods

Gods are eternal
Language is infinite

08.07.2005

A circle means: sun | moon | city | whole | visible | tactile | nothing
A straight line signifies: a journey | a sentence | the invisible divided

08.06.2005

Gluey heat of luminous, yellow valley iced by altitude
Glush of snowmelt streams between feral, spoored ferns

His vision was not large enough for a soul, but his hunger was
Every there and back, every festering corpse, hits on the scantily-clad soul

Midnight slap-shot of wind rattles and knocks through the whole house
In the wakeful heat of dark, night-rats gnaw memory's garbage

08.05.2005

Flower: for a little while it escapes from time
River: wallows in time, is swallowed by sand

08.04.2005

A body matches the years, a mind matches the minutes
Heart matches the void that hollows every second

08.03.2005

Rock shows its history to the canyon
Forest shows the snow to the summer

Time always arrives disguised in yesterday
As for a future, only the human part's unknown

08.02.2005

Stardust, charcoal, [ ________ ] recollected in tranquility
Seagull cry in the airshaft of the hotel @ 4 a.m. ends a dream

Looking for a word I don't know in a city I don't know
Words are born in and reign over things of this world

The tide has a tongue
9 p.m. sky still harbors some radiant sunlight

08.01.2005

A word is an observation deck
360º of focal points for the insatiable eye

Each word is conceived in an urge to forget
To lead as well as mislead — the fate of sight, the work of words

A good reader is like salt
So many vocal points of focus in a day

Dad, will this past be a new past in the future? — A.J.
Forget in order to know; know to fill the forgotten — Edmond Jabès