In A Welcome Way

There are mornings when the mist moves in waves, or seems to, across the far field into the maple trees. There are mornings when I am not lost, and there are mornings when I am.

And the goldenrod blooms and grows dull and then sags towards the ground, as all extravagance - which yellow is - must. One cannot long study the rain without seeing the violence inherent in each drop.

Morning passes nearly wordlessly, the dog pacing back and forth, the narrow leaves of the backyard willow fluttering nearly imperceptibly. When will we see at last that there is no prayer but the one prayer and we are it?

"Pigeons are the angels of the city." How happy I was in those days, writing without any thought of commerce, not exactly content to live in a car, but not needing to change it right away either.

T. brings a brace of pheasants by which I fry in flour and oil and we talk about hunting almost as if we are ready to be done with it. One studies Chopin and their confusion deepens in a lovely, in a welcome way.

A blur of words is never without revelatory capacity, according to the reader's relationship with longing. I mean an open heart is creative without consideration of that which appears to contain it.

At night I dream of a strange ungulate - with ruby-colored eyes and a rich brown stripe along its side - , whole herds of which move fearlessly through the bracken at the field's edge, and intuit that their name can only be revealed by my largely silent, largely sorrowful, father-in-law. Sigmund Freud awaits his tea as Keats rethinks his Grecian urn.

Memory is a biological fact, nostalgia a consequence of misdirected attention. Please don't take up geology without respecting the theology (however misguided) with which it was so long entangled.

One learns to heed the generative impulse as it is - essentially, semantically, fruitfully - God. Disciples of the signifier unite!

There are mornings in which the illusory nature of both resolutions and ideals cannot disturb the flow from which we so briefly rise. I want you to be happy, I write what was given to be written, I drink coffee dosed with whiskey, I pretend the maple trees call me brother and then am not pretending.