Distant, Mysterious, Nonexistent Even

The cardinal only matters if you say it does - the red flash between budding maples, the vivid reminder of what is missing but not gone - what is never gone but here - but what really matters is the underlying belief in mattering.

One aims now for sustained attention, attention given to the granular, the blade of grass, the sparrow's wing - not the wasp nor the wasp's shadow but that perception underlying both.

Study engines, all of them.

My philosophical doh-si-doh is your finger trailing down your lover's spine, his shiver, moan, his falling over into blankets, tangles, where you take him just so.

No other, no words but does the opposite follow: no words, no other?

I don't want to write about visitors and travelers, because it suggests I'm not finished studying a particular error which really really means it may not be an error but a correction and then what.

It's all worth looking at but what's really worth looking at is the underlying idea that there is that which is more worth looking at.

Slowly - gratefully even - one goes back to seeing just birds, just trees, just flowers and things.

Perception is part of the problem but there really isn't a problem outside of perception.

On the back porch one is not alarmed by not writing, hour after hour, day after day, for there is always reading, which is simply writing another way.

Ah but he once wrote that her shoulder resembled the moon - the waning gibbous sinking westward like the last note of an old country song about love - and what was that really but a plea to see her naked.

Rivers, always rivers.

The external landscape shifts but rarely does so dramatically, even as the interior becomes beautifully - unbearably even - radiant.

Sit quietly by and let it all be, which it always does be anyway.

Another batch of clover insisting the particular is yet relevant even as the one with whom to share it remains distant, mysterious, nonexistent even.

Poor Buddha, poor Jesus.

The mail comes, insisting as always one study the mechanics of expectation through a lens of disappointment.

Don't wait on my invitation but simply visit and we'll see what happens even if what happens is that nothing happens, or something else happens.

Reading on the landing listening to voices downstairs and remembering - if that is the word - Emily Dickinson.

The first time I heard the phrase "turn the other cheek" I was a child and thought it meant being kissed by your grandmother twice which seemed mildly annoying and an odd thing for the son of God Himself to be concerned with.