August 2

How curious the way the body seems encircled by conjectures, a nucleus spun round with a frenetic wreath of electrons. The instant of our being ensnared in its apperceptions, its steep & fathomed levels of compare, its absent attenuations or taut binds to the gravid expectations of the past. How we are never, can never be fully & singly here, can never utter a word of now being. Where perhaps in youth growing older resembled a coming-in-to-order, a woven thing, loomed & purposive, instead I see each thread individuated, frayed, laid out for my examination, & my fingers that would yoke them into some delicate pattern, braid them into a strength beyond themselves, they seem instead in some paralysis at my side, some quieted palsy, locked in an ongoing obsolescence. & so the quiet morning thrums with its inhering repetition of every other quiet morning. The humming in my head, the offbeating heart both doubled & multiplied with their selfsame recollections, conscious or not, harmonious or grating. How we half-remember, conjure forms of our past just into their recognizability, like an orange backgrounded in a Cezanne painting, striped in blue-green shadow, lineated, none of the vermicular pocking along the rind, more a suggestion than a thing. The imprecision of memory, the ghost-making of it, how it proceeds in faith on penumbra & clipped light, a slivered pulsing alphabet to spell out some small sense, wavering against oblivion like a far-off flower swallowed in ground-heat & barely discernible for the blur. But then, how it suffices as such, how it permits of reanimation, how we can temper it anew. & every day we do. Play with ghosts, call upon the dead, close our endless distances with the swiftest of yearnings. How desire is a recognition of distance, a measurement of gaping, empty space. A recollection of breath.