Dear Yoga,

The Christmas you have sent
is second only
to your company.

I collect my thoughts,
the poems disappear.

Like Christmas.

It's a little like walking
from the tip of Manhattan
to the bottom
only to be shot through a bridge,
a wobbly and wonderful
(because olden and real)
bridge.

One of us
had a tape recorder,
we transcribed a bit,
laughed and inhaled
the best words, best order
we could muster,
but the real beauty of the walk

stayed put.

No, these are home movies.
They unmap the heart, they
map the heart. Huge
as a carnival. I snagged
three balloons.

Lucky

me.

Fill In The Blank

Better to be Polish in _______ than ______ in the arms of a German.

Fill in the Blank

God walks backwards through the heart, taking time's _______________ along, sulkily and gleefuly. A sweet, spiritual equivocation bids us human holes and hollers. The good stuff, best stuff, amen.

Fill in the Blank

A man's relationship with endurance is more __________ than sobbing.

True or False:

Anyone so invested in winking hardly has time for eyes.

True or False:

Bread and water are clean dreamers.

True of False

All problems in the world are caused by too much or too little bourbon.

Camus 3

"Naturalness is not a virtue that one has: it is acquired."

"Truth is not a virtue, but a passion. It is never charitable."

"The acceptance of what is--a sign of strength? No, this is where servitude resides. But the acceptance of what has been. In the present, the struggle."

They have to grow out of your mind naturally, like grass out of the ground:

cadillacs, creation, immortality,

the way Welles builds a set and lets the wild world dance,

encounters in a Kafka, the pure ranges,

and, sometimes, scent.

It Takes a Plague to Raise a Village

Lately considering all the moments from Camus' The Plague where the description of a character or event becomes so perfectly clear that it seems to be hacked away from the rest of the narrative and just standing there gleaming in a good, clean light.

For example, just starting out, within the first hundred words or so, before he has even an ounce of our trust, the narrator asks us to conjure up a town without pigeons. And I am steady, steadier, than fiction.

He says things like "what is needed is imagination," not "order."

"Her father," meanwhile, "was a railroadman. When off duty, he spent most of his time seated in a corner beside the window gazing meditatively at the passers-by, his enormous hands splayed out on his thighs."

That's exactly it, I think to myself. That's not my father or my friend but this particular man.

If we could see life like that, as a series of impressions stacked up clean, not to be judged but maybe just . . .

If we could cultivate a kind of . . . to see each passing thing without encumbrance, without horror or passion. Without pessimism or the "what's it to me" that sucks blood and pounds breath.

I will stay with this book a long time, practicing the kind of slow reading that returns books to their truest place: risk, the risk of unsettling, the risk of taking it all too seriously. Changing life.

I can't remember anymore if this is a good thing, a terrible thing.

"These were the people, no doubt, whom one often saw wandering forlornly in the dusty town at all hours of the day, silently invoking nightfalls known to them alone and the daysprings of their happier land."

Charles Bukowski's Kick On Inspiration

Somebody at one of these places [...] asked me: "What do you do? How do you write, create?" You don't, I told them. You don't try. That's very important: not to try, either for Cadillacs, creation or immortality. You wait, and if nothing happens, you wait some more. It's like a bug high on the wall. You wait for it to come to you. When it gets close enough you reach out, slap out and kill it. Or if you like its looks you make a pet out of it.

Cesare Pavese:

"To know the world, one must construct it."