Below the Canopy of Sky
Ginsburg: “I meant again if you place 2 images, 2 visual images side by side and let the mind connect them, the gap between the 2 images the lightening in the mind illuminates. It is the Sunyata” (Craft 57).
Paul Portuges: “The idea is to ‘reach different parts of the mind’ that exist simultaneously and force them together to create a temporary suspension of habitual thought. The result is the gap that stops mind-flow, arrests normal consciousness, and creates a temporary void” (”Ginsberg & Cezanne,” Contemporary Literature [Summer 1980]).
I have a feeling it’s all what we make it–nothing, at rest, but something coming–already invisibly arriving. I’m not hip relaxed enough to chat with funky strangers–it’s not pleasant for me–not rewarding enough.
The problem is: I think there is everything to loving with the body–and I have nobody to love. I have spanned oceans, continents–really been there, and am more alone than I was. I love the Italian pink-shorted lilt of a girl who just passed here where I work at Galilee State Beach; girls fascinate me–but they also elude me–don’t come to me–as in Brazil they did. But here the gulfs are deep between people, and there is a mash of competition and idealism which swamps even the best impulses–with fatigue, bitterness, and finally loneliness.
It will soon rain again where I am. The sky has been gray and the air is wet–pregnant with rain.
This wind, this wild creation, this sight–burning insight, is just words–but–how dim dies the tapered wick when the curl of comfortable rooms comes best blasting. Lazy fast the flickering wandering light. In night, and cover of darkness. Eat the peaches blur blasts main harbor still while hope turns into.
If I could, not like a prophet, mistake, all I read: art and magic doors, that I, and travel, roads, and forest paths, to places, wonderful and clear, and music, for a charm–spaces for the heart to play in–well I wonder and I want this and nothing more. Today, when the wind blows gray, below the canopy of sky on which these vagaries are strong.
Constantly my heart should capture distant harmonies and glittering reveries not only the drummed up medicines and spells of relief but the ever opening teeth of this sunken belief. Tender, tenderly the monstrous vengeance dispenses justice with truth, nonsense with solidity–questioning ever.
Nada but the eternal delegation of consciousness, each for a space in this freedom of air. Brazilian insects whizzing and floating.
Why do I keep trying to write when it is so hard? Each word now is heavy and the going is slow. Heavy and hopeless except for the eyes of that woman. The idea that writing is a consciousness-changing process.