le thé des écrivains 7” x 8 ¾”
(purchased: Paris, May 2006)
10/8/06
I am beginning to think
that duration a given duration
for now
might be a solution,
edging out into an evening, a day, a year.
With sinuous intent or lack of shape
deliberate as the year’s invisible
architecture. A reality of that
complexity, eluding any agreed upon
set of descriptions.
Invisible river time the stream I
And wade in the water
And God’s gonna trouble the waters
10/12/06
Not so much the meaning of time as acquiring
a feeling for it. One’s given medium, the mystery
of being in it with little sense of what it is.
Inexorable. Unaccountable. Nothing but a counting up.
How quickly we slip past any awareness of it.
If the poem is long enough it begins to acquire a time
all its own. How time presents itself as a question. Philosophy
more often than not is not musical. Percussion
marks one kind of time. Body the proper site
for sighting time. What is it that is in time?
Already in time you come to a thinking of it.
You cannot hold it up or out for inspection, though there is
nothing else you can do, being in it, is to inspect it.
10/13/06
If you rise at dawn to meditate
If the day takes on certain properties
Time as the horizon We have landed We are
already there If upon entering the word-space
as tangible as the entering cold front the wind
& cool air motion so manifest through the dipping
pine branches Witness to the incremental & the natural
temptation to lean on anecdote as a measuring stick
But it is the very invisibility the indistinctness that is
the story restless as it is
Months the hummingbirds visit Ask the cardinal
the indigo bunting the bluebird Time is color
10/14/06
I am the data Let me look into it & I will
report back to you
I walked out into the
mystic garden. Already too much has happened.
Bow to the governing nothingness
which is another name for time.
Unless you awaken to the strangeness of time
its radical unfamiliarity its hidden invisibility
the life of an ontologist will make no sense.
To track what you already are in.
Sitting on a black cushion before a blank wall
counting breaths as a way to enter into
a feel for the miracle of time. By dimming the vision
we begin to see it. By counting & following the succession
of breaths we begin to feel it
to calibrate
its animating strength.
10/15/06
Kin as I am to an earthquake in Hawaii.
Coffee alters my relationship to time. So too
the fall flowers the last bloomings before the first
frost before the leaves change color before the grass
turns a dormant brown. It is not though the seasons
that concern me. I want to know when are the seasons
felt as something personal & finite as part of a limited
countdown felt as a savored particularity. Again,
the fact of being the fact of time not the object not
the what in time but the medium itself known through
its objects.
And where most of the time are brother &
sister being & time if not behind you or just out
of view in the other room or somewhere else waiting
for you to call. They no doubt would have
their own questions to put to you. They will. They
will sketch them slowly upon your body until you
notice them.
And that invisibility is an essential
aspect of its ingenious construction. So that we live
within it are it & only rarely feel it or reflect
upon it or investigate it.
It will be slow going
writing reading thinking along through Heidegger’s Being & Time
a book published the same year that Babe Ruth hit
60 homers.
There is a dead virginia pine just beyond the back
fence. My fourteen year old dog is going deaf. My six year old
granddaughter is having an American Idol birthday party. I like
them but I have no faith in anecdotes.
I take it back.
I’m sure this preponderance of an abstract seemingly pointless
set of speculations becomes its own reductive mimesis
aping an invisible & amorphous time.
Lyn’s Comedy showed me
a way to have no form. And so I took off.
Narrative presents
one small element of time’s story.
Let’s face it; most of it
does not become a story. End of subject.
An earth
quake a snow storm a gorgeous fall day a memorial
symposium for the wondrous robert creeley
now there’s somebody
who felt time’s variable metric & mastered its lineation
or at least the primary stutter steps the hesi
tations & a kind of thinking happening staccato
like a bebop sax solo
Do you expect
to hear a cog of the sky
turning?
The aphorism
on the other hand
brings time
seemingly
to an enforced temporary halt.
And thus conclusion
forfeits any credible relation
to time.
10/16/06
rain a day of steady gray is this
time’s drizzled medium something no wonder
we cannot wake up from
10/19/06
It will begin again
with or without you
so you may be the cork bobbing
along the stream rush
or not. The old dog stumbles out
of the garage. A group of blue-garbed
hospital workers laugh around a circular
table eating & passing
dishes of Chinese food. Outside
it rains steadily. How would you
impose specific meaning here?
Resting upon narrative
Leaning upon anecdote
All I care about
is that window
When I can feel its presence
When I can begin again
to see through it
As if
you were a subject
being touched upon
10/20/06
Late afternoon clearing crisp blue fall sky I
sit reading
itself a fading art form
while my eighteen year old son & his friend
watch a Japanese animé film
left to him by a former student of mine
who is now in Kyoto studying. The very thin
asparagus came from Peru. The wild coho salmon
perhaps from Alaska. Has the nature of time
changed fundamentally from what Heidegger was
tracking? Or merely the props, the accoutrements,
& the medium of our engagement in it?
10/21/06
And so the occurring & the being present
already take place
as in this writing or this instance
(not instant!) in which you & i take part
in this passing
back & forth. Or, quite simply, we gather here.
As one of the many unremembered poets
put it
shall we gather at the river.
There is no “trying to say”
The captain
checks the manifest. You are on board. We
head out.