sources

1. adrienne rich / lisa congdon
2. david thorpe
3. shary boyle

Letter to My Mind: Part I

What no one tells you is that you are stuck
with the body and the brain you're born into,
like a marriage arranged before
you were of position to consent.

What no one seems to know is whether there is a 'you'
aside from this body and brain.
Good reason indicates there is not, but
your gut feeling, in unintented irony, disagrees.

What no one warns you is that the facts you seek to decide the issue
are slippery moss-covered rocks,
impossible to grasp and far less glamourous
than you were led to believe.

What is easy to lose sight of is that nothing has inherent meaning.
Today you pass a dump truck the company name of which
is an anagram of your own.
Tomorrow it's the name of a tree.

What you will find out is that being alive is not hard
in the way that tennis is. It's hard like religion.
Droughts of faith will sometimes occasion atheism
that only daily practice might stave off.

What you must remember is that you are not alone
in this.
You might not have chosen this body and brain,
but this is not a new revelation. And you will be fine.

And, you will be fine.

happening

john cage + merce cunningham 

yin and yang

tooth

Last night I dreamt that my mouth was you.
Fed you cut diamonds until you bled.
You (and I) were speechless, a silence
fractured by the crack of rock on bone.
Time lays witness to our private violence.

the plain sense of things

Snow / Saul Leiter / 1960

Street Scene / Saul Leiter / 1959



The Plain Sense of Things
Wallace Stevens 

After the leaves have fallen, we return

To a plain sense of things. It is as if

We had come to an end of the imagination,

Inanimate in an inert savoir.

It is difficult even to choose the adjective

For this blank cold, this sadness without cause.

The great structure has become a minor house.

No turban walks across the lessened floors.

The greenhouse never so badly needed paint.

The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side.

A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition

In a repetitiousness of men and flies.

Yet the absence of the imagination had

Itself to be imagined. The great pond,

The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves,

Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence

Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see,

The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this

Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge,

Required, as a necessity requires.

New York circa 1950 / Saul Leiter

(thinking about aging.  of course i am not old enough to be house in disrepair. but the spirit of aging, the awareness that you are, at times and in variation, not always fully alive, like a glossless pond with lilies that no one really sees.  that this is inevitable, that we should not fight it.  that it is only a moment, one of many.)