“Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances.”

01 April 2009

"I may not believe in myself, but I believe in what I'm doing."


driving to work with #4, almost late, a tom turkey is courting in the dead grass. i turn around, pull into the circular rut in front of the empty farmhouse. hes enormous and grand. i notice for the first time the rudder feathers behind him, giving the impression of length to add to the great ruffled width. the hen is slender, a pin to his ball, an elegant apostrophe to his pregnant parenthesis. the image of them carried me through the day, that man may blunder and folly his way through the world but its spring and there will be more turkeys. more of everything that has the sense to thaw its blood and dance in a meadow on the first april morning.

"If civilization had been left in female hands we would still be living in grass huts." --Camille Paglia


i got lonesome today, that lonesome i get when i long to be away, smelling the sky and walking away, deeper into elsewhere, watching the light and walking away. that lonesome that reeks of people. that lonesome that eats like salt or sand, when what i wish to be is most alone in the wood or on the ocean. away. this line of work, any line of work that blends one into the yogurt-smelling concoction of humanity, tests my ability to give the impression that im capable of keeping it together. i surprise myself.

"And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise."


i bought #4 swedish fish as a surprise. i bought milk for breakfast and a root beer for the agita and the man and i laughed about the local law enforcement and i put twenty-two cents in the take a penny leave a penny and she was sitting at her table with her one-eyed father and his huge grizzled friend sid eating port wine cheese and crackers from the sleeve wearing a blue knit hat with this huge pompom on top. sid says we met before and i cant imagine. dusty likes to drink beer and drive too fast. she grew up in this house. i remember last summer her father dead drunk on the neighbors lawn as the band played comfortably numb.

"I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction."


tonight im looking forward to wading deeper into once and future king with #4, trying to sleep without pharmaceutical assistance, and dreaming in the big ship in the dark hamlet in the cloud valley in the blue world. jerry croons country and i eat cereal for supper after everyones gone. i try to do my best but i dont think its quite good enough, or right. its a brokedown palace, listen to the river. outside the peas are sprouting. underground the broccoli sends up its two-ply seedling and the lettuce stretches up pale hands toward bars of light. evening comes.

"There was no difference between the behavior of a god and the operations of pure chance."

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"And if the question were asked: What is more real, the mundane or the sublime? most would hesitate before they gave an answer. On the one side, details: say, the aftermath of a breakfast, dirty chipped plates in the sink, their rims encrusted with egg yolk. Against this, the unnameable: small aching heart with boasts, what can you know? Outside the cage of everything we ever heard or saw, beyond, outside, above, there lies the real, hiding as long as we shall live, there stretch and trail the millions of names of God burning across the eons. When all through this our end will come before we even know the names of us.

For many the egg yolk prevails." -L.M.

"Love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is done well." -V.V.G.

"The perfection of the Absolute where all Becoming stops and pure Being, immutable, timeless, unchanging, hangs forever like a ripe peach upon the bough." -E.A.

"...and the whole incident was incredibly frazzling and angst-rod and filled almost a whole mead notebook and is here recounted in only its barest psycho-skeletal outline." -D.F.W.

"At the top of the mountain, we are all snow leopards." -H.S.T.

"Only when we are no longer afraid do we begin to live." -D.T.
"Cometh a voice: My children, hear; From the crowded street and the close-packed mart I call you back with my message clear, back to my lap and my loving heart. Long have ye left me, journeying on by range and river and grassy plain, to the teeming towns where the rest have gone - come back, come back to my arms again. So shall ye lose the foolish needs that gnaw your souls; and my touch shall serve to heal the fretted nerve. Treading the turf that ye once loved well, instead of the stones of the city's street, ye shall hear nor din nor drunken yell, but the wind that croons in the ripening wheat. I that am old have seen long since ruin of palaces made with hands for the soldier-king and the priest and prince whose cities crumble in desert sands. But still the furrow in many a clime yields softly under the ploughman's feet; still there is seeding and harvest time, and the wind still croons in the ripening wheat. The works of man are but little worth; for a time they stand, for a space endure; but turn once more to your mother - Earth, my gifts are gracious, my works are sure. Instead of the strife and pain I give you peace, with its blessing sweet. Come back, come back to my arms again, for the wind still croons in the ripening wheat."
-John Sandes, The Earth-Mother (excerpt, 1918)