A Kind of Limitless Envelope

At midnight the dog asks to go out and I follow her with cold tea, drag a chair to the maple trees. No stars, no moon. Saturday will dawn rainy but for now a faint mist pushes up from the pond, visible when cars drone by on Route 112. Something is happening, something is giving way.

More and more I turn to the old ways of doing things: bread in the dutch oven, an axe on the trails, candles by which to write. I am struggling now to say it in a way that is helpful, knowing as I do that what we say is not - not really - needed anymore. I can't get past Molina's similarity to Neil Young, which feels imitative (my interest is in the limit he hit, a mystery the other side of which he never found). Ecclesiastes a kind of navel as the uroboric fantasy is never entirely ended.

Conviction of any kind is problematic (though I am mostly thinking spiritually), as wordiness is too but differently. In the dark, I can't say what color my coat is but I know what color it is, see? Putting up peppers and apples we talk about what we didn't do in our twenties, which is a comfort of some kind, though precisely how escapes me. She is part of the epistolary impulse, which is part of the impulse to define, both of which I am - as yet - still working through.

A sort of silence beckons, a sort of singing. I never know what is next but language always takes me there and never leaves me bereft. What a comfort to know that our bodies know how to die! And kissing, too, is a kind of fulcrum, a way of delineating the edges of perception.

Boredom has always been a problem, the only real fixes for which have been writing and hard work outdoors. You go further and further and think this must be it, this is where it ends, but no, there is always another turn ahead. Collecting anything (quartz, say) is simply a way of slowing down what naturally rushes, what naturally functions as a kind of limitless envelope. I mean, once you write "unmappable" you've mapped it, and so what - what - did you really mean to say?