from Velocity But No Location

There is pleasure in composition, in grasping the connection of the one and the many. The way we gradually discover how the dancer's movements are anchored in, and anchor, the axis she spins around, the way the backbone is held up by the muscles acting in concert or our sense of self by the mirror. Without it we are forced into constant activity to make up for the lacking image. Like the squid or dogfish, being heavier than water, must swim continually throughout their lives. Desperate activity, I say, and often fruitless, all brains incessantly active, down into our dreams, leaves off the fever tree, electric.

It's difficult to realize the groundlessness of our beliefs, but my style is fragmentary in any case, and my life as perplexed as my writing. Wrong connection, conniption, conclusion, shirt inside out, buttoned wrong, short breath. Rain comes, and mist clots about the trees. I reshoulder the wrong assumptions, say “I know” the way we'd say “I am in pain” and don't question evidence or self. But then, clear conscious discrimination is an accident between the vapors of the mind and the opaque body, the cracking of knuckles, biting of fingernails. Still, I believe that all mammals, apart from the duckbilled platypus and the porcupine anteater, give birth to live young, and the females nurse them.

At some point the temperature drops to frustration, powdery snow swallowing all sounds, tires, boots, and explanations. Then we have to pass to mere description and admit our secret affinity with confusion, which is as fundmental as order even though all living things labor to maintain the latter. No crystall ball or balm for the sorrows of reason. Which means treasure or treason depending on the conversation you have your foot in, and water, water. Meanwhile a man enters a bar, another goes by in the street, a woman looks in the mirror, a cat hisses at a cat, and a fly buzzes on the window pane.