A curtain blows in the wind, the window i s closed, inside the inhalation blue, then red, purpling, a spread bruise
This, written before what I am about to write::
Here,now, I am reminded of when I would make phone calls to arrange grocery deliveries, this I did for work, a food bank, when I first came to california, many lonesome souls, many men:: stories: war, teenage loves, ex wives, brutalized pet lizards, tuna fish sandwich
To hang up on someone, an impossibility. I,d speak for long enough that I’d get in trouble, I’d talk with this lovely woman in her nineties who prayed always for peace, and I was working into the winter, when the clocks changed, how they did not so long ago, and the shapeshift of the conversation as it stands in my mind::
Isn’t it a shame, an hour of daylight lost
Not at all, she says, for the night quiets
Today it has risen, this new year has risen, egg poaching in the water bath, My eyes hurt from crying, i haven,t been able to in weeks. Footpaths of things forgotten and unsaid:I am in the dark alone, we are all in the dark together, it is velveteen and divine, living in the shadow permanent, and it is really this I want to talk to you about, how I have been spending my time, so much of it in the dark
And today, today today, A love supreme, not Ms. Alice’s, which I,d listened to in the night a few days earlier, but instead John’s, in a group of us thirty, all with planted feet and eyes closed, a sheath of darkness surrounds, and my forehead to the heavens, but, soon enough, I am upside down, the I that is my mind, folded in two, chest to knees, if you can understand, and that is how I receive the transmission of coltrane consciousness this week, upside down in the dark, until I can hear the hum of my blood, at first reassurance but then a horrible pressure, a beautiful pain, then to stack my head onto my hands onto my knees, onto my shoes onto the floor onto the building onto the foundation onto the earth, onto the pulsing heart
And by the end, thirty three, everyone is singing the transmission Dear Listener, all voices into a singular eminence, the liner notes, and when the light returns, eyes of mind closed all the while, I see a color i,ve never seen before, something that belongs to the inside, I can’t say, so I know you won,t be able to picture it,for it ran completely from language adequate or legible, so you,ll trust,
This, written days ago now, I’m taking too long,
The rose petals on the ground are chalking the marble
Dark moon, tomorrow, the darkest part of the year over, there,s no need to squint to the horizon any longer, here the sun lifts and we enter the age of the morningstar, river side walk
Floating some where above the ground, connected of course to power lines, upwards a mountain, structure made of wax and wood, the lines now on the ground, a dark train coursing through and around, the tunnels are made of rock, a museum of th e heart, some one a loaf of round bread, warm wheat, stopped now:they are crossing the cows, between fingers a web arcane thin:::
Drink now, then, the fruit , bore singular and dying, let not
The fence laid ground heavy with rainWindow sash rot :and replace, leadened glass under a rosebush a solitary bloom:the bloom a solitary petal:the petal a solitary drop of dew sweet
You, i, understand
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