that was careless of me, and i apologize. when that song came on i was thrown back to toledo. spain. it was mid-summer and we'd endured an almost unendurable train ride from madrid. in the dead heat of the day, i forgot to watch the clouds and the sun; those incredible formations in el greco. storms came in, without even coalescing, just a wall of mist and electricity and streamed through and left as soon as they came. i'd fallen asleep, drooling. i know this sounds almost too much, but someone had a guitar. so i fell asleep to the guitar, privacy falling around us, and the heat was so dry. it would suddenly start raining and disturb the earth and the rolling fields, the grasses that had two sides, shining and dull with dust so that it came in through the windows. and we were going to read st. theresa's hot manuscripts, with god's heat and his burning landscape. but just then i was sleeping and uncomfortable. maybe i was afraid the guitar string would snap.
so there was like, this church of privacy around us. out of my mind, disoriented and groggy, in my dream, and a man came around selling cokes. so david got me a coke and i sat up, grumpy, and then was really easily charmed. blinked like a baby owl. i love you, coke! the guitar player still wasn't very good, a german student with a backpack and lots of little braids, colors and strings in his hair. pretty sure he was square-jawed and solid. i leaned against the window and watched his forearms. they had the golden fur i love so much. the corded muscles from rock climbing. it's a small mystery of arms that just kills me.
anyway, tomorrow and the next day i'm also pretty sure work is going to be a fucking jerk so it's nice to remember those very strong, very furry and masculine forearms and really how very bad his rendition was of "wild world' or whatever cat stevens it was and how cold my drink going down. my dear, be bright. remember this.
that secret that we know, that we don't know how to tell.... is that christmas morning? 19a. Jesus said: Blessed is the one who existed before coming into being.
showing myself letting myself go. so i'm just saying don't stress the lengths of your sentences. it reads better to me in everyday language, colloquial (the way we breathe, have sex, meander, star-gaze on a cold winter night)... but i also have this kind of joyous quirk when you veer off into exhaustion, when your "self" blurs. like that nice moment with you and t. after your debut. that's all. also... grief and missing someone that much. what's left but to turn to someone you love and take them in. i'll represent you in this wilderness as best i can. because i love you and i'm starting to love myself, and you will change, or (please, no. not again. do not leave yourself) leave. but stay if you can and love me. thank you for loving something in what i'm sending your way.
and how did all those books start? in the kitchen of the murray house, and then somehow charles wallace and meg always goes for a walk to the star-watching rock. thats how they start. one foot in front of the other. and you know, like 3 immortal beings and a unicorn or a seraphim thrown in there. (and someone in the murray family is always making someone else hot cocoa. swear to god). they become about love and time travel and getting back to something like trust and grace with things that are familiar, and so readily problematic to the larger society. like fucking, for example. that the relativity of connection has no underlying foundation, there's no relative ethics to breathing, i mean truth.
i re-read a swiftly tilting planet last summer. happily crashed out on the daybed on my mother's porch with the morning sun, my little sherpa hat, wool sweater and coffee; and realized, startled, that you could change time. (also, i'm wearing the exact same things tonight. i used to wear this hat after i got out of the pool, during winter practices. it was dead cold outside and this awesome hat, brought back from macchu piccu in peru kept me warm. i was warm and my muscles hummed and there was a sweet ache thru my body all day. i could shrug and feel the last sprint, the last careening 100 yards all the way through my back. the stretch of it, and black ice-hot concentration). 52. His disciples said to him: Twenty-four prophets spoke to israel, and they spoke of you. He responded to them: You have deserted the living one who is with you, and you spoke about the dead.
like, what do you actually go through waiting on line to get into the club. you text, you talk, smoke... and then all that convolution stops with a smile, or eye contact and another contractual agreement starts.
and then you wait for the bus, exhausted.
your grief wants to sing for you. let it appear scattered and corralled by shadows, there's a cascading hill behind you, thoughts dripping with honey. because the loss is there. and you need to take it thru it's paces.
i feel like the commitment, however small, to constellations is fine as far as it goes. but this really is about you. your ability to understand that you're dealing with something that is both utterly material, with material consequences, and utterly immaterial at the same time. no contradictions need to be resolved. "but that this act requires fundamentally transforming the dominant logic models of Western science. It requires moving beyond the mutually exclusive, non-paradoxical model in which all contradictions must be resolved."
i think it's slightly hysterical that science is catching up with being. "your blood like so many ribbons in a tornado" frank o'hara. he says somewhere else "What an oak!"
i was born to adore you
as a baby in the blind
i was born to represent you
to carry in the sun
to carve your face into the back of the sun
antony, the crying light
so let me finish with frank o'hara, again:
We dust the walls.
And of course we are weeping larks
falling all over the heavens with our shoulders clasped
in someone's armpits, so tightly! and our throats are full.
Haven't you ever fallen down at Christmas
and didn't it move everyone who saw you?
isn't that what the tree means? the pure pleasure
of making weep those whom you cannot move by your flights!
It's enough to drive one to suicide.
And the rooftops are falling apart like the applause
of rough, long-nailed, intimate, roughened-by-kisses, hands.
Fingers more breathless than a tongue laid upon the lips
in the hour of sunlight, early morning, before the mist rolls
in from the sea; and out there everything is turbulent and green.
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