April 13
I am thinking about how cleanly divergent thought & feeling can be—two ghosts with no cognizance of one another, haunting the same tired house. & how powerlessness can sting me so, crop up from some long-dormant regret to stab & swiftly withdraw. how in thinking about the irrecuperable past it is our nature to rhapsodize over conditionals, over conjectures of what could have been, when in any case here we are, our palms upturned, our hearts in some heavy wake, or some spirited discovery, or lulled instead by the soft, plain music of the ordinary. that none of it effectively matters. & that it could not matter more.
maybe, maybe those twinned ghosts can have names, & one of them can be the nihilist & the other the solipsist. & both can drag their spectral forms through the relief of shadow thirsting after some bright light that will never come, & both can feel the blue-black umbra of the moon, the color of a raven’s wing catching a silver arc of refracted star. & both can pace the floorboards & hum & flicker, & any eye that beholds either can widen, relay the fear to the heart, let the heart relay the fear to the fingertips, which rise, rise to the whitened face. & so passes the night. & then the roseate dawn, & the specters fade, & time, time seems to open out from itself again & to permit our obliviousness its daily trespass. & suddenly the memory of the ghosts, too, thins & dissolves, form into smoke, whisper into susurrus, until it comes to cusp teetering where our recollections are swallowed whole by their erasure, & the breeze comes just so, say, & it is fled from us too, with its wake of exhausted fear. another irretrievable thing.
& so. where now those ghosts? & how changed the ground beneath me? the snow upon the soil. I cannot believe that I mean anything in this world. & I cannot believe otherwise.
& so we cull our recollection for what is reft from us. Pound, he was wrong, after all. what thou lovest well. & our remembering is a reanimating, & those ghosts move now differently than they did then. it is an act we will them to perform, isn’t it, to accord with our shifting want. but they are never there, never really there, though we look & look & look.
maybe, maybe those twinned ghosts can have names, & one of them can be the nihilist & the other the solipsist. & both can drag their spectral forms through the relief of shadow thirsting after some bright light that will never come, & both can feel the blue-black umbra of the moon, the color of a raven’s wing catching a silver arc of refracted star. & both can pace the floorboards & hum & flicker, & any eye that beholds either can widen, relay the fear to the heart, let the heart relay the fear to the fingertips, which rise, rise to the whitened face. & so passes the night. & then the roseate dawn, & the specters fade, & time, time seems to open out from itself again & to permit our obliviousness its daily trespass. & suddenly the memory of the ghosts, too, thins & dissolves, form into smoke, whisper into susurrus, until it comes to cusp teetering where our recollections are swallowed whole by their erasure, & the breeze comes just so, say, & it is fled from us too, with its wake of exhausted fear. another irretrievable thing.
& so. where now those ghosts? & how changed the ground beneath me? the snow upon the soil. I cannot believe that I mean anything in this world. & I cannot believe otherwise.
& so we cull our recollection for what is reft from us. Pound, he was wrong, after all. what thou lovest well. & our remembering is a reanimating, & those ghosts move now differently than they did then. it is an act we will them to perform, isn’t it, to accord with our shifting want. but they are never there, never really there, though we look & look & look.
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