Day by Day

On Women and Languages

"Sometimes, they are all alike"
Water runs from the tap ...
Like a river, I have followed ...
Released into a field, where the sun and the grass ...

Esquisse

From the train car I saw her
Walking the path around the village
While the city it was the mountain

As the singular lamppost on the lawn
Met the great track road
Under its great rolling dirt cloud



(where we survive)
http://books.google.com/books?id=LTGFV2NOySYC&pg=PA287&lpg=PA287&dq=%2B765%2B170%2B2129&source=bl&ots=X5unbeUowM&sig=wy-wUcMb3YdrW0GtznZYogMOoU8&hl=en&ei=9gGpTan_LMjQiAKFuqHvDA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBsQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%2B765%2B170%2B2129&f=false



***







Letter of Alexander to Aristotle

When looking back on those days
among bright trees, talking overlooking the city,
I start hearing your voice, and what
you might say about the questions that
teem and wave inside me
as the world unfolds dimensions even you,
Great Teacher, never knew. It amazes
me how small everything once had seemed,
which is I am moved again today to write,
so many thoughts now moving through me,
to you who had first moved them in me,
back when they were the only things
that were real, among our bright talking.

In a forward movement to a source,
one feels not that one is going back in time
but that time in all its tangled paths of past
momentum continues, keeping all the parts
together. Thus what you or I call Fate or Will
is only what awakes and finds that moving
brightness still there, breathing forth again
the beginning. A pod-shaped puddle on this
street -- on which, mind you, they speak some
bastard mutation of Greek, it seems -- and
onto which I look from the caravanserai,
having arrived

here just tonight upon a tough uphill handling
of the horses -- through a pass -- the puddle
shines with the light cast back from the sun
to the moon tonight -- which itself refracts
in the water, while the water, by degrees
of connection, moves slowly on to disappear
in sky and wind, moving again in cloud,
by virtue of that sun, which incides
by suggestions of the moon by night,
by gestures of its real self, by day.

And so you may, good father, regard this
bundle of letters, this missile missive bound
to its mark, because I knew you, this bundle
of things, clattered together, borne safely
across by our sailors, our steeds -- you may
regard this present union of disparate
elements of our times in space -- a version
of the one sun which dispatches them,
dispersing, in the waters.

Thus you had taught me, old master,
in that room those days that like dawn
wavered with light, those days on the shore
in the peace and the genius of the river,
pointing as we gathered around, as the
megaliths in shadows loomed in world war
colors on the horizon beyond the cars
of cattle... but lightly, lightly like laughter
the trembling droplets of the rainfall
on the trees, like the wavelets of kindness
in my first lady's eye, and your voice
creating in me the texture of now,
and its roots, gathering up again
that light, lightly it all stirred in me
the moving pictures of this beauty,
so that I find myself yet again, sending
you this message from afar, from across
these lands of time, and of tongues,
and rolling clouds of earth and of thought.





***

Beyond that half-opened door...

As the airplane waits with people you might know

to join the rumbling silence over this continent

to land them in a city where it is just as noisy

as your head here and now, you think of
your loved one's voice, leaving here, landing there,
where other friends wait, other roads twine,
and the city is awake to itself among land and water
as close to that reality as you are far, but as much
a part of you. The music's made that way. Chorded
quest: Wild Sylvan, Fisherman's Wharf, the Watchtower
sessions at Olympic Studios...