Once upon a time, in a land where archetypes dwell…
I knew
Fingers tighten on the notion of a pen with a nib like a barb that snags aching flesh to bleed onto paper.
I knew a woman
Once upon a time a story’s sharp, pristine acid is immutable, the barest etch an exhalation of a truth to be found and a truth in the finding.
I knew a woman, lovely in her bones
“Writing things down doesn’t make them true though.”
And yet…
And yet.
I knew a woman I knew a woman I—
I strain to hear into the silence. The subtext is there, waiting to be parsed.
(I’m martyr to a motion not my own…)*













*poem by Theodore Roethke

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An Alchemy of Transcendence

All the new thinking is about loss.

In this it resembles all the old thinking.

The idea, for example, that each particular erases

the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-

faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk

of that black birch is, by his presence,

some tragic falling off from a first world

of undivided light. Or the other notion that,

because there is in this world no one thing

to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,

a word is elegy to what it signifies.

We talked about it late last night and in the voice

of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone

almost querulous. After a while I understood that,

talking this way, everything dissolves: justice, pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman

I made love to and I remembered how, holding

her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,

I felt a violent wonder at her presence

like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river

with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,

muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish

called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.

Longing, we say, because desire is full

of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.

But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,

the thing her father said that hurt her, what

she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous

as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.

Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,

saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

 

- Meditations at Lagunitas by Robert Hass

 

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In transit

"Tell me now about entanglement."
“Einstein’s spooky action at a distance.”
“Is it related to quantum theory?”
“No. I mean it’s not a theory. It’s proven.”
“How is it all again?”
“When you separate an entwined particle and move both parts away from the other, even at opposite ends of the universe, if you alter or affect one, the other will be identically altered or affected.”
“Spooky. Even at opposite ends of the universe?”
“Yeah.”

- O>L>L>A
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