RIVERSPELL31
brocade
The sound of Annette’s sweeping (on exitless Dundonald) reminds me of Frank O’Hara, who writes en passant and exited life in that way. Nothing said delivers life or words from themselves – always there is something wanting. Now I am at home and preparing to close my eyes. I hear the new neighbours’ chickens: their cacophony is urgent and needful. Many times over I call them Frank O’Hara but they insist they are his friend John Ashbery, and unaware of Anna Jackson, our own maternal prestidigitator of scattering flocks.
Who can give me a correct sentence? Enlightenment is forever maternal. Truth’s insouciant bee lands awkwardly on a yellow flower: eeb ysub.
An object doesn’t need you.
It is necessary for the blackbirds to bark in the morning.
There is no intruder.
Rupert Sheldrake calls it a filtering. It seems that our metabolism, beautiful (& unstable) as it is, determines our perception (within the confines of a box). Origin & destination mimic that predicament: ‘Now let us think’ exceeds its place in a box?
The literary novel is done for, opines Virginia Woolf's female cousin, themself a Plantagenet of sorts. The decoy becomes the prerogative of sisterhood, not witches. The generic plot thickens, like blood.
Words are sweet things I breathe in and out. Unsalvageable. The narrative of life is not a straight line, or crooked, or a line at all. Literature and mathematics parley, like looping fence wires, hooking here and there, venturing without final purchase. Nothing is less endearing than a flattened horizon. The seagull glares at me across the filling lagoon at Nunguru. What does that principle mean?
Whitehead: logic is a subset of aesthetics: dans Whangārei.
Was I to spend an entire life disentangling a single decent word it would have been worth it. A single decent sentence is more precious than a library catalogue. Life is iteration. Whosoever’s voice takes you inside guides you with meaning, like looping wire, or a busy bee. A poem knows it is inextinguishable, two ins to get out, just ask Aristotle. At most points a further interval occurs, as during a passage of music.
‘e’s everywhere
leave a mark
as 'Queen of mathematical constants'.[1]
RIVERSPELL32
Four I's:
I enter the same room thru the door opposite. I think of life as fundamentally flawed. Poetry addresses a fundamental catachresis. I wish I could be made less whole.
A good poem opens a conversation that asks to be joined. Even as it opens one possibility after another. There are many ejection points. Life is a series of tremendous consequence. Statement is amplitude. What is the energy quotient in a language system? Out of the billion splinters possibility occurs. That I do so now is at their mercy. Shimmering among the billion shimmerings. Curnow perches above the crossing branches of poetic possibility. A round of bright pōhutukawa filaments he characterises as a sacrificial offering. Another high calling: it soon toos! Slaughter is me, she demurs. As if ‘wristiest slaughterman’ is she and he a slaughtered poet.
Measurement is a form of consent (possibly doubled).
Separation pocesses the mind.
One sees rengarengas flowering in the shade of the pōhutukawa and the river knows which way the water runs, upstream before downstream (see earlier). As I pass, under the mangrove walkway a group of mallards takes fright. The birds carry water with them, billowing like a tablecloth. Piet tells me he misses the Te Tai Tokerau birds ‘in their millions’ and I notice millions of yellowing mangrove propagules spread in near-perfection on the Tamaterau sand, where I step carefully over them, utter blessings, and enter the water. The world is a benevolence.
Whether singing or hanging, the blackbird and the grapefruit are the same object. In springtime everything bursts. Shags pop like corks under the bridge. The blackbird, a worm in its mouth, flicks its head and the worm flies. Does one’s tongue utter bottlebrush or a thousand orient rubies? The blackbird does the stitching, its beak the colour of the grapefruit, on the grass at Mt Eden Bowling Club, where John Ashbery composes and circles struggle to break free from one another: a flock ever in return.
Allen says: ‘A poem that you could get in one, and explain in one, well, that’s it. Put the book down, you’ve had that one — been there, done that. But the best poems should not leave you with the “been there, done that” feeling. There’s something there that you will never get. They will remain teasing, and something stays hidden in every poem, even from the poet’ (courtesy of Shirley and Roger Horrocks).
The paint on Will’s roof is a faded green & has the sun spread over it like paint after a night when the moon is full & everything I see is illumined, as in Kawabata’s the Lake. Now there is a series of linked shadows that mill over the light green colour. I can’t distinguish particular & general in a world of deference. Language isn’t truth in the form of words.
Now five I's:
I love what enters my eye.
I love the taste of what enters my mouth.
I love what my arms or fingers wrap round.
I love what fills my nose.
I love what my mind thinks.
Propensity is form.
Formless propensity.
'e's everywhere.
[… in progress]
note
[i] ‘The queen of mathematical constants: e = 2.71828… it’s everywhere’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-IG2dTby6Q. And, in a similar vein, well sort of: Gilmore Girls, Season 5 Episode 7 – ‘Said gap ‘twixt d and f…’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iHckencrmk.