Thanksgiving

One of those days when you want it to stay like it is, after rain and the sun's shining and there may or may not be another storm coming.

Can I say I am happy? I don't know. All I know is that I have time to think about things like dromoscopy, in which the trees might be moving toward me and not me toward the trees, a notion first put forward by Paul Virilio.

"Why not just look at something and paint it the way it is," the painter Rackstraw Downes says of his art after he stopped painting things the way he thought other people were seeing them and started painting the way Rackstraw Downes paints.

If you saw Charles Baudelaire in the street, would you recognize him? I'd like to think you would. If I saw Baudleaire, I'd ask to see the scars the reader never sees, knowing that the act of making a poem is an act of bravery, a battle to break through what might have been said to what had to be said, knowing that a large part of writing a poem is in finding a way to overcome your own language for things, to get to  the language that gets past language, the poem being language that's both right in front of you and way, way beyond.

Only the on-going improvement of our language will improve our lives. I know this now, knowing a little history and watching how the past is used against us, century after century. Poems are embedded in the atomic universe of language and only given, through an act of mysterious grace, to those who have the will to write them.

I don't even know where to begin with gratitude. Sometimes I see such a little path, or no path at all. Sometimes it's so immense it's overwhelming.