Specimens, Days

Note to self: sleep more.

But then that, too, a kind of sounding, an architectonics all its own. A sort of script. A preface. & there’s the thing of it—how we surrender ourselves to experience but cannot let go the thought of the thing, the conscious presentiment, that dim intimation of structure. & so a moment in which we feel ourselves perfectly conjoined with phenomena holds its rusted anchor yet, & the wave washes it over, & still are we tethered, bank-chained, rooted in that grey-blue alluvion that we allow ourselves to consider at rest & ample for the root-room. Bed down, then, silt & shifting pebble. Bed down & begin a constellation. Which is to say that there are no daemons but in our faiths, no rubric of order but we would draft its design in the first. No news here. & this, too, an echo. There is in Keats’s odes a gradual unclenching of the fists, a slow & ponderous relinquishment that seems to me always somehow relevant. It is how thought works on the world, I thin

This morning a fine, almost particulate snow, a spring snow, a dust feathering the air against the blue-white whorls of cloud & sky, & the sun meantime casting the falling flakes against its rays. These kinds of mornings. The peaks of the mountains enshrouded in newfallen snow, falling still, while down at elevation the ground breathes & swells just above freezing. & where the snow has receded, the colors seem to shock even in their tired, faded hues. The vermillion at the willow’s stem. That first pallid green. The puzzled landscape. The last few days I’ve felt a kind of tremoring incredulity at the simplest things. Words falling into line, the hand reaching from plate to mouth, the slow whir of the truck’s engine. In the minutiae this strange & bewildering ontic fact reflected: I don’t understand being at all. The heart in us, the yearning, that indefatigable longing. I don’t understand the beauty around me or my want to embrace it. I don’t understand the passage