1977

Although a kind of orderliness
emerges from the mental organization
preceding the first frame of the film
I lay down at that time the
blurry and later faded edges
of the sun spelled out of what this vast
if vaguer field offers to my
senses, my intellect and my
imagination. Even the voices of birds
which beat an exciting rhythm
in totally sympathetic
synchronicity with the even more
chromatic aspect of their tie-in
(I've allowed myself to drift along
with the sound of a plane)
as long as I can simultaneously pull
away from the voices of people calling
back their dogs from my dog, here in
the sunny pavilion of similar parks.
I am quickly begging the world to be
still as it can to listen to the
drums and the other noises that
let themselves drift in this strangely
unfamiliar position in the grass in
the Spring sun. Finally it's here.
I don't want to be interrupted
because I'll need time to mentally
and physically absorb the energy
that waiting can somehow
bring on more quickly to the earlier
connection with incoherence, horizontal,
vertical and small. Maybe I'll try
to pretend to not be impatient.
There I am at your table not
talking. In that frame of this
time a world has changeable,
replaceable parameters. The moon
is then allowed to have as many
phases as it can, every
connection as vital as the one
before and the seemingly tighter and
looser phases
before the end. Even now I'm
almost too excited by that
confident expectation. The
attitude could suddenly change
into a very detailed sequence of
images and sequentially
satisfying motifs so that then
things would stop just before an
unexpected turn-off. Then you or
I or we would get lost and even
a little scared, but that little
touch of fear would not be
represented by a need to get
suddenly busy. It's a smiling
impatience, as if you were
hesitating on a platform against a
cliff high above the sea. Below the
mountains are folded in widening
and narrowing parabolic shapes.
This adventure can stop any minute
and lapse into boredom. Sooner or
later the sun will warm me less,
the wind will come up with some
word that doesn't belong here and the
essay will have to stop. No matter
how many times I say or shout or
scream the leaves are mine, they
will laugh at my screaming
when I go to the marketplace. You
sing the moon is mind and they
will pay you there a dollar for
singing that reminds me of the
marketplace in Marrakech and the
red stones and now the shadows
of the leaves against the page are
diamonds. It's almost impossible
to believe how sure those drums
are. There is purple in the shadows
the blurry edges of the shadows
surrounding the clearer edges of some
of these shadows and the
clear, sharp images of the twigs.
The bird comments that the sea is
still out there. No, I can prove it,
I wonder how long those shadows
could speak of themselves. The
words insist they can talk
out loud. The quotation of the
word geography subsumes itself
in orchestration against the
parallel sequence of thoughts
which humbly accept the continuous
assistance of the music the world
is creating through its movement.
Next to them the words speak
themselves awesomely as voices
interrupting a peaceful, descending
counterpoint.

Now, overlooking the lake, I
realize that plane was a helicopter
and the drums I thought were
far away are 50 feet away. I
can make out the drummers' faces
but not their expressions. The important
thing is that the sun is on my
face here. Also from here the sound of
the crowd of the fountain is much
louder, the right track of the stereo
for my right ear and the nearby drums,
now there is a rattle, the maracas
and there is the shadow of my pen and
my fingers instead of the leaves I
made the symbols out of transferring
the image of continuously, kaleidoscopically
changing meanings tonally connected to
the shifting patterns of noises set
against the once stopping feet at the
lower edges of my vision of the notebook
lightly interrupted by the consciously
repeated titles like "Call Collect,"
and the sub-title, lots of this won't
exactly mean anything or mean too
much.

Evn today, I won't give all the
sun to poetry. I want a beer.
I want the expectant pretty faces.
I want the smell of food. Moments
of noticing and being noticed. This
is close enough. The air is clear.
I need to think about the transparent
smell of the air and its shifts-
now a bird is throwing in a
syncopated note. A woman
passes and her dog is playing
with Whimsey. My noticing needs to
coincide with meanings that
shift irregularly but regularly,
like tides. I'm glad there's a word
like transparent to distract me on the
path to a sentence. The conversation
of birds is almost too precise, like
electric rock. Poets notice we think
different than we mean to think,
so they bring along several
languages for this, including
an off-key remark after the
reading. The page is my table.
Words sit all over the place, where
they want to.

Go get blown away from the
table. Go get a beer. The days
divide with paragraphs, the essay
becomes a calendar of things to
do, I'm pre-occupied with schedules
all the time, lists of every kind.
It takes more than one moment,
for sure, to remake the play in
Chinese and allow all the drift
I need. I let in the wind
again. Some of these sounds might
have been planes.