We are sitting in a café on St Denis. He is drawing wings. I am nearly in tears. I am in tears. I am thinking of my childhood. How did it ever come to this? These lumps in my body that can kill?
They go on talking in the downstairs room. I listen to their voices from high up, in the sunshine, as if I had died, that is what I am imagining, that I am only a memory to them now, and my body that moves, & laughs, & sleeps, is stiff & cold somewhere in some piece of earth.
Accept everything. Accept even that, the grace of it, to be a memory, visiting like sunshine on a January day, hard, brilliant, glittering. Don’t struggle against destiny. All these angels – preparation for some reincarnation?
...
February 1993 [Paris]
And all that freshly turned earth …
The fields lying fallow, furrowed like graves
How what comes from the earth returns there.
What gives life, a furrowed field, looks so much like rows of fresh
turned graves, in this season without light, this season of mist
Then, rising above the clouds to find there is still a sun, still
capable of heat.
And the streets full of colour, and faces, & eyes that look at you
And markets full of fruit & fish & abundance as of another time,
We forget this, we in England with our hunched shoulders,
and our cramped step, and our few winter apples, the skin
wrinkled, & the flesh soft.
The search for authenticity, the authentic self.
...
10 February
Consider
How the body, striding up the highest ridges of itself
Might glimpse, not the bird
But the eddies spinning off the tips of its flight
Not the snake, but the rush of air
Into the filament of empty space
Left for a moment by its passing.
...
11 February
What slips away at dawn
The beating of drums, and all this warring, these tribal dances
Along the meridians of fear, or desire
The impulse of light
And how long has it been since we saw the sun
How long since the waves stopped rolling shorewards
In the aboriginal self
All the voices, shouting, as if to say something when what is needed is silence
To finally set the tongue against the teeth
And pronounce some small thought/intention
All that freshly turned earth
And nothing growing, and no light
Nothing can make us turn aside from the truth of silence
Sitting daily before images of a universe
Where the title holds the word desire
...Then images
Unclotted from the sleeping heart,
Then sunlight and the waves
Rolling shorewards
In the aboriginal self,
Then the vortex of the tongue
Pronouncing, finally,
Some small intention.
...
21 February In partenza, Charles de Gaulle
So much to look forward to, so many possibilities, places, people. The thing is to accept that life is an adventure, and any adventure has difficult moments. But really, it’s more fear than physical. With the right strategy, the right environment, why can’t I keep my body in balance with itself? No reason. Be gentle, be attentive, be understanding. Make life easy for yourself. There is a kind of joy of movement, a moment almost like flying inside yourself, soaring, with the sun, & the music, and the train moving out of Paris, leaving behind something so good, so solid to return to. I feel deeply capable of leaving you deeply free. A very beautiful moment on the train leaving Paris, of that energy which propels you through life. Places with fresh air, and sunshine, and the sea, and spring on its way.
...
6 May [Moulin de Pique Roque]
Going into spring
Naked, with the perception of leaves
And light
No more complicated than the slip of a lizard
Over stone
How, knowing neither horizontal, nor vertical
The uninhibited leafing in the forest
And budding in the meadow
The flesh insistent
Sun falling on the pale belly
...
10 May
The thing is not to let the doctors take the poetry out of your body, your life
La dame Picasso in the next bed
The encumbrance of flesh, too much flesh
Too much life, perhaps
‘Bon courage’, ‘oh, il y en a’
And her sister at the foot of her bed, this
Saying ‘je refais ma vie’
Saying how she lost the baby after six months
An error by a doctor
A life come only to the edge of the world
After the pain
We have no memory of pain, only of the darkened room and the antiseptic
Ses doigts sur mon dos, soulageants smell and the nurses coming and
Déja je te manque going in[to] the night
Corpo traditore, amico corpo
...
21 May
Lacework of morning
Lacework of birdsounds
Lacework of light beneath the tree
24 May
Voyage
And you may go to the ends of the earth
And find neither comfort nor compassion
And you may fall prey to …
All of this can happen, even
In a small boat on a summer pond
25 May
You think a river knows when it’s getting near the sea?
Wide and slow & begins to taste the salt
Well I’m not like that
I still feel narrow, quick & fresh
Still somewhere in the mountains.
31 May [Land’s End]
Walking the Cornish Coast Path
I didn’t believe her when she said that,
That the world is its deepest and richest
Exactly where you are, always.
Each bit of the landscape
A piece from somewhere else
The surf, and the wind
And the rabbits at sunset on the grassy bluff
And the café with one’s mother’s name
Eating scones, sunburnt
And no way home, we are saying
No way home
...
22 June
The Steady State Universe
Turning restlessly near sleep
The slow drip of matter
Itching the night,
You find yourself in the dream
Where you are walking endlessly
Towards a flat horizon,
Down a road with no vanishing point,
Aching for everything to be born
Screaming
Out of the dark,
For the possibility that one among us
Might contain within his flesh
The first particle of the universe,
Like a door prize
With no prize.
...
3 July [Silvi Marina]
Two dolphins circling
A Day at the Beach
You say ...
And he says ...
By the time the shadow of the umbrella moves
And the sea goes from green to blue
Five medusas, with a purple fringe
And a squid in the bottom of the boat
Spitting ink
Two girls, sisters crouching in the waves
You remember something from your childhood
And the sun going down behind the hill
And the dolphins arcing across the light
On the water
This kind of pleasure
Drunk like waves on the sand spilling
From the sun
And the sea going blue And the black man from Africa
And then green With his claret glass beads
And then the sky And his loose clothes blowing
And the sea going blue In the wind off the sea
And blue an African wind
And going, and going,
And you stare at the underside belly of the umbrella
And the waves keep coming, and coming
After the papers, and lunch
And swimming in the green
You can only have come from here, no more,
Wait, suggest something
And the sea, no longer green
And the sun going down behind a white house on a
blue hill
And all the humanity bodies passing between your umbrella and the sea
Along the strip of shells & weeds
All of them, carrying their flesh upright at the edge of the sea
Or bent, or bending
And drinking a beer at the bar, sand between your toes
...
6 July [Pescara]
And then the heat comes If transcendence could be
White birds, flying north by moonlight
You have to seek transcendence
In the furthest part of the world
And the water going to the sand
Wave over wave
Something about the future
And the things that come in sleep
And seeking transcendence
On that strip of sand between the sand and water
Which is both sand and water, mercurial, bright
On the pewter sea
And the sea going green
And then blue
And blue
And the sky
In your father’s house
And grandfather’s garden
The olive jars
And the breadknife going to the past
And the authentic silence
And the aboriginal self
7 July
And rigour
And silence
Quantum field theory
All particles, everything, born of silence
And expressed with a kind of rigour
...
September in Turkey
3 September
– Arriving in Izmir
These are the smallest coins, he is saying, handing us three silver coins, nothing smaller, and counting bills, three of them, or four in the small room behind the window, counting. Outside, the bus just leaving, it is midnight, the pavement wet with rain, though now there is a moon, full, riding over the city, and the radio playing something from the deep night, arabian spirit music, moaning, notes sliding against each other, sliding. In sleep currencies become time, tiny lire ticking quickly, with no value, just a [rhythm meter] pace of life. In all the streets, taxi drivers doing things, waiting there, their lights like small fires to warm themselves, in bands like gypsies, waiting to go out into the streets, randomly, as if all this driving, asking, might lead unexpectedly to the right street, the right door.
...
9 September
Arriving in Izmir
Standing at the counter waiting for change:
But there is nothing smaller, he is saying,
Pushing forward three silver coins,
Thousands.
Outside, the bus just leaving
Past midnight, and the pavement wet with rain,
Though now, a half moon over Izmir,
Half-built buildings
As if they were changing
But there is ‘no change’
Just currencies
In sleep, becoming time
No value, just rhythm:
Tiny lire pacing the night.
Finding turquoise on the small pebble beach
Small pebble of sky
Of the sea itself, condensations of Mediterranean light
A tiny disk of turquoise, tool marked on one side, the other rough
These must have belonged to someone
A boat with treasure that tried to shelter here in a storm
Returning from Troy, could it be?
Offered now by the waves to us
Could they be mine, was I once shipwrecked here
Is the sea returning to me what is mine?
Under all that water
Lying like strangers among the rusts and greys and whites
Like someone passing speaking in a foreign tongue
Like an idea, a sudden point of understanding, that can slip away in the next wave
Something so startling, so apart
What we lose comes back to us with patience and with time
Such tiny treasures out of a huge sea
Each like a small impulse of joy
That we have known before
Nothing like it on earth, perhaps the sea, the sky
A small bit of sky, its transparency evaporated leaving only the blue, solid
...
Parsival
If one day you are out riding in the forest
And the universe reveals itself shows appears to you
Suddenly, like a desire
Like sunlight coming through the rain
Like a castle with a dying king
Don’t ask the questions you’ve been taught by science
*Ask it everything in your heart you ever wanted
Are you finished? lonely? sentimental Is it finished?
Are you hungry? Is it lonely?
Do you suffer from headaches? Does it have imaginary friends?
Are you lonely? Does it get confused?
Do you have imaginary friends? Forget things?
Was your childhood happy? Does it dream?
Do you get confused? Does it never stop moving,
like a fish?
Forget things? Is it Afraid to die?
Do you dream?
Do you never stop moving, like a fish? Does it have a favourite smell?
*What you can measure is only part of what is there
...
Dark Matter / Reflection
We are Narcissus, we are all the stars,
Our attention arrested
By the miracle of self.
We are also the deep blue
Going downward
Without light.
...
Like a dolphin out of the sea
Recognition, like a friend, like a letter
Winter descends on even the villas of the rich
...
19 September
Contemplation of the Turkish coast
A beetle falling dead from the sky, like an omen
A blue and white steeple with a bell
Five hundred cupolas in winter
21 September [Kios]
When the sun barely climbs above the horizon
And yellow leaves blow across the ground
Epic of a wind in Greece:
You, heroes blowing at the gates
Rattling the windows, billowing the lace birds
You in your small church praying
Saving small boys from snake bites
From death, from blindness
From medieval endurance
We go on walking up the dirt road
Towards the dry hills,
High above the ocean with its white waves
Asking, and the dust swirling off the road
Squinting against a low sun
The streets and shops full of the religious
In their hats, their dark and angular shoulders, their eyes
Return to life
In a hot town inland
The heat rising from the road
In the hour of the siesta
A kind of death, like sleep passing over the town
Past the bar with the hunters / have returned with their stories
Their dogs restless by the
street
We turn to the dry hills asking what it is they kill there
In that landscape, as if death were something geographical
A point on the map, an x for every individual, an exit
To go out of the world
And sometimes you come so close you see it,
With your soul you see your body passing
...
26 September
Going to Samos by sea.
It is so easy to take it for granted
That the sun keeps going round the earth
The things you catch out of the corner of your eye
The things you know in the back of your mind.
Sea silver, blue
Sun climbing
Small boat passing
Through a white
Bell tower
On a hill above the sea of olive terraces
From here, blue sun
Bright sea
Small stone church
Heat
On a hillside, terrace, blue sea, light,
Small stone church
Small boat passing through
A white bell tower
13 October
Falling into a black hole
If we influence the observed thing, then by observing the wave
function of the universe, we cause it to collapse in such a way that
puts the universe into a state where it can produce us. Can this be
true??
Feel the universe, how it curves.
...
Brief Explanations:
1. How science works
‘What we cannot talk about must be consigned to silence.’ Wittgenstein
Where is this big pool of silence where everything collects?
What does it look like?
There is a set of allowed questions, and a set way of answering them.
Everything collapsing into words, like wave functions, an object