Just-hatched eastern phoebe nestlings in the portico over my front door.
Spread Mind
Manzotti is what they call a radical externalist: for him consciousness is not safely confined within a brain whose neurons select and store information received from a separate world, appropriating, segmenting, and manipulating various forms of input. Instead, he offers a model he calls Spread Mind: consciousness is a process shared between various otherwise distinct processes which, for convenience’s sake we have separated out and stabilized in the words subject and object. Language, or at least our modern language, thus encourages a false account of experience.
Lavender
Some days, you do not want
to wrestle with; you do not
want to try too hard—
you know that even an only
steady rain can beat back
the just-purpled heads of
lavandula: and so you set
the pot to shelter under the deck
awning until the mist has risen
from the trees. You wait until
the air has rinsed to clear,
remembering the Old French
lavandre, to wash, the Latin
lavare, also to wash, as you go in
to close your eyes in the bath.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Indebted
OWE OWE OWE OWE
OWE OWE OWE OWE
OWE OWE OWE OWE
OW OW OW O WE
A rare attempt at a concrete poem.
Wading
Would you like a hand to hold, said the woman I had just met, as we made our way into the surf. I had just mentioned I didn’t know how to swim, but wanted to wade. At our feet the water darkened then foamed. Coquina clams burrowed into the sand, and periwinkles, and sand hoppers. I shook my head and smiled. She strode out to deeper water, dove under; then floated on her back, as comfortable as someone in a hammock, feet pointed toward the horizon. The waves rolled in and out. The current pulled beneath, around my legs. The depth of letting go is always changing: that bit of sand erodes as soon as the heel touches down. Boys guided kites and ran toward the jetty. Farther away, row upon row of hotels and sunblocked tourists. Where we were, the gulls swooped lower, crowned the evening with their lonely sounding cries. We rolled up our towels and made our way back across the road as the sea began to stretch into vaster dark.
In response to small stone (95).
Ghazal of the Eternal Return
What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more’ … Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.’ ~ Nietzsche, The Gay Science
Clamor, raucous clamor, of cicadas amid the trees— Who has not
heard those notes before? Uncanny, insistent, especially in return.
How would you feel if you had only one brief window to leave your
mark, to wed your fate, then fade? I’d do it over too, upon return.
And it’s all good, is what it seems to say: not just the joys but all wrong turns,
chances missed, errors, hurts. But to repeat them all, to have them all return?
Not merely bear the necessary, Nietzsche says: still less to conceal it.
Most days I try but fail to completely understand how fate is love, returned.
One summer we walked along the seawall at dusk. The waters roiled
with humid vapors. A cyclone cloud of gnats circled above, then returned.
The wings of insects shimmer, their bodies hard like minerals in the dusky
light. You can’t pick out only the heart of dark obsidian for return.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Camping in bear country
too much august not enough snow:
Our worries, we confided around the campfire, are long and keeping. No matter where we are, they stay with us. But when we camp, everything is so much bigger, we don’t think beyond the fire ring. Up here it was easy to fall silent. Sweet, really, to have an empty mind.
Human “thingliness”
What I’ve always loved about the notion of the ten thousand things is that we ourselves are included in their number. Human beings, the Zhuangzi says, ‘are but one item’ amongst the countless things of the world. We are not separated out from the world. We are not a separate creation. I find this restoring of human existence to the thingness of things—this restitution of our status as things in the world, in the same way that cats and telephone poles and supernovae are things—a huge relief after centuries of philosophical labour that sought to demonstrate that we are set apart from other things.
Digital
Each finger burrows
into its own sleep.
One or two twitch but
the thumb lies still
as an anchor.
Come morning, those
that dreamed will blossom;
the others will leaf out.
And I who kept them warm
will rise like rain in
a tall tale & take root
in a cloud of your breath,
so soft, so sea-worthy.
In response to “Hands.”
Landscape at Dusk, with Disappearing Crane
And in the movie or in the book, when
the crane that was quietly wading
at the edge of the river suddenly lifts
into the evening sky until nothing is left
of its body save for a silver-white curl
thinner than the edge of a rose petal,
the attentive reader knows that this
is a trope, both shorthand and preparation
for what happens in the next scene or chapter:
the one where the family patriarch, gone
into the meadow to retrieve a ball tossed too
far by his grandson, crumples to the ground
in the fringed shadow of tall grasses;
or the one where the guests come across
their friend who never returned to join them
for after-dinner drinks, slumped in the garden
in a wicker chair— And the other tropes that
follow: dusk reflecting off a raindrop’s filmy
surface, everything caught in trembling,
minute accuracy: prismed lights from a nearby
window, orange haze against deepening
blue, white gauze of a scarf or handkerchief
the woman brings to her mouth or her cheek
to stifle a cry or staunch a sob— And over
and underneath it all, the water’s rhythms,
steady and unchanging; papery hulls of leaves
and blossoms, floating away on the current.
In response to small stone (96).