change in a vase

like a bird on a wire

like a drunk in a midnight choir

i have tried, in my way, to be free

Walking down a country road, so many bones and bodies, so many forms disintegrating on the gravel. A jawbone, delicate as carved ivory, a patch of fur, the trace of wings turned up into the air. And I look up to the sky, half meaty grey, half clear blue, and all I want is you, god, all I want is you. 

Walking through the earth, through all these incorporations of form and matter, all these creatures of breath and shape, all the insane variations of motion, I have reached the age of thirty one and still it only occurs to me to ask why. Haven't I learned my lesson? Haven't I heard the Buddhist teachers, haven't I been told by friends and strangers to give it up? Don't I know god is in the details? Don't I know better?

But I've given up looking for sense. No more looking for the blueprint. No more Platonic ideals. But the why drives me, drags me on, like the carrot on the stick, like the golden thread through the labyrinth. 

I'm packing up my whole house. Dragging all the bags of letters, boxes of pictures, piles of notebooks out of the closets and getting lost in their labyrinths of memory, self. What to do with these things? They exhaust me, but I can't give them up. Mike said "memories are like stones and you're trying to swim." I said "how can you be such an unfeeling person" and he said "I was mostly joking." But I was really arguing with myself. 

This old outcast guy, Vahdet, from my summer house, once told me about some writer he knew who had burned all his notebooks. That's a real writer, he said. A student of mine once wrote a good poem about how Bakhtin had burned the only copy of his manuscript (or rather, used the paper to roll cigarettes). Is this guts? My mother burned all her journals and asks me intermittently if I still have mine. She regrets it.

When you're tired of swimming, let go and float for a while. Float in the ocean of existence, in the knowledge that you are the ocean, the Tao. All these books and pictures, they're all my resistance to change. And within the notebooks are chronicled over and over the same resistance to change. But if the only constant is change, then I'm holding on for dear life to temporality. These notebooks and pictures, these cards and vases, these shrines, these mirrors, these handcarved necklaces-- these are what keep me mortal, and I'm holding on to them for all I'm worth.