My earliest experience of language included letters as image - the cursive capital S a sailboat, for example, and the uppercase A like the chapel made of pine one might come upon in a dream. Flags don't matter but a window is a border and we know ourselves in crossing. What most we long for hides behind language, as once I wanted to escape, once I wanted to pray.
I mean are you there yet? One spends a long time in the forest getting clear on how much they can go without. Joy is the river but also her smile over breakfast and sneaking out later to kiss behind the barn.
You aren't getting any older either! Often what I mean to say is what I said first, then clouded with heaps of steamy prose. I remain entranced by Jonathan Edwards.
I remain the dance of turtles and hedges? Certain rifles were meant to be buried far away from the house. Yet another poem about longing means yet another distraction from wholeness.
I, too, have a library addiction. Denise Levertov (Oblique Prayers) on a whim, and then remembering almost thirty years ago hearing her in Vermont with you, and going up to her after to talk, and how kind and open she was, telling me to write more with my eyes closed, and not to force creativity into one mode only (we can do anything - we don't have to just write poems). We whisper because we are getting somewhere, we listen because we know there's nowhere to go.
The mountain emerged slowly from night and seeing it one felt the expansiveness - the emptiness - to which we are all effortlessly related. I can't sleep for the memory of rose petals! I drove slowly as I do now, happier on foot, knowing that speed disrespects all landscapes.
Thank you for turning the light on when you did! And later leaving a note saying "thank you I love you goodbye."
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