PASSAGE31
brocade
The sound of Annette’s sweeping (on exitless Dundonald Street) reminds me of Frank O’Hara, who writes en passant and exited life in that way. Nothing said will deliver life or words from themselves – always something is left wanting. Now I am at home and preparing to close my eyes. I hear the new neighbours’ chickens: their cacophony is urgent and needful, insistent. Many times over I call them Frank O’Hara but they insist they are his friend John Ashbery, and are unaware of Anna Jackson, our own most decent maternal prestidigitator of scattering flocks.
Who can give me a correct sentence? Enlightenment is lugubrious and free. Truth’s insouciant bee lands awkwardly on a yellow car: eeb ysub .
An object doesn’t need you.
It is necessary for the blackbirds to bark in the morning
when 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 a place in a box?
The literary novel is done for, opines Virginia Woolf to her female prodigee, themself a Plantagenet. The decoy presumes the prerogative of sisterhood, not a witchcraft. The generic plot thickens, insinuating bloodlines (bloodiness).
Words are sweet things I breathe in and out. Unsalvageable. The narrative of life is not a straight line, nor a crooked, one nor a line at all. Literature and mathematics parley, like looped fence wires, hooked intermittently by embedded staples, 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 in practice?
Whitehead: logic is a subset of aesthetics: dans Whangārei.
Was I to spend a life disentangling words it would have been worth it. A single decent sentence is more precious than a catalogue delineating innumerable titles. Whosoever’s voice takes you inside thought guides you in the direction of meaning, like wire looped between fenceposts across paddocks, or a busy bee on some driver’s yellow bonnet parked outside the library. A poem knows it matters to have two ins to get one out, or go ask Aristotle sitting behind his desk. At most points an interval occurs, across a passage of music.
‘e’s in everything
depict
'Queen of mathematical constants'.[1]
PASSAGE32
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 more whole.
A good poem opens a conversation. It opens one after another. What is the energy quotient in a language system? A shimmering a billion shimmerings: Curnow perches high above a crisscross of branches of poetic possibility. Brightly lit pōhutukawa filaments are characterised as a ritual bloodletting. Another high calling: Wristy slaughterman is she and he the slaughtered queen.
Meanwhile measurement implies your consent.
Separation needles the mind.
One sees rengarengas flower in the shade of the pōhutukawas and the river knows which way the water turns, both upstream and downstream (see earlier). As I approach, a group of mallards nestling under the walkway takes flight. Water burgeons like a tablecloth in their wake. Piet tells me he misses our Te Tai Tokerau birds ‘in their millions’, and I notice a million yellowing propagules spreading in near-perfection across the sand at my swimspot at Tamaterau, where I step carefully over them, utter blessings, and enter the water. The world proves a sudden benevolence.
Whether singing or hanging, the blackbird and the grapefruit are the same object. A shags pops like a cork somewhere under the bridge. Another blackbird, a worm in its mouth, flicks its head, and the worm flies. Does one’s tongue utter bottlebrush or a thousand orient pearls? The blackbird does the stitching, its beak the colour of the grapefruit, on the grass at the Mt Eden Bowling Club, where John Ashbery composes in circles struggling to break free from one another: a flock ever returning.
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 Horrocks).
The paint on Will’s roof is a faded green & the sun spreads 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 taking the form of words.
Now five I's:
I love what enters my eyes.
I love the taste of what enters my mouth.
I love what my arms and fingers wrap round or touch.
I love what fills my nose.
I love what my mind thinks.
Propensity is forming.
Form is immediacy:
'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.