walking

Sun all day, face in the sun, sun on rock, rock above water, water near path, mind on path, walk on path, sun on face, brain on fire, more walking, more sun.

returning

Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow
by Robert Duncan

as if it were a scene made-up by the mind,
that is not mine, but is a made place,

that is mine, it is so near to the heart,
an eternal pasture folded in all thought
so that there is a hall therein

that is a made place, created by light
wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall.

Wherefrom fall all architectures I am
I say are likenesses of the First Beloved
whose flowers are flames lit to the Lady.

She it is Queen Under The Hill
whose hosts are a disturbance of words within words
that is a field folded.

It is only a dream of the grass blowing
east against the source of the sun
in an hour before the sun's going down

whose secret we see in a children's game
of ring a round of roses told.

Often I am permitted to return to a meadow
as if it were a given property of the mind
that certain bounds hold against chaos,

that is a place of first permission,
everlasting omen of what is.


I admit to having a thing about meadows, fields. This evening I went for a walk in one of my favorite fields. The air was cooling off. A breeze stalked me and I let it get snagged in my hair. There was a kind of returning, when I returned to this place "of first permission," the field folding into me.

gone

I've been gone but here. Thinking and losing thought. Losing has been happening. Still, lots of reading. Also I've considered this space. But that's for another day.

quote/unquote/Where I'm At

an elsewhere falling apart from its lack

even then, another's body was both landmark and landscape.

the thing is a form desire takes

I'm calling up the tongue-and-groove gestures, the hook-and-eye moments of the day, so they might again spend themselves freely, mark the layers of events en route, classify the waiting.

how the notion was forming, with hawklike curves

See how the moments go layering up

I am tied to the sight of the world, to things burnished and scoured by use, and by their diminution loved.

indulgence, a failure, partial sight

--from a collection of essays by Lia Purpura