with art we seek to stabilize an explosion of everyday living rhythms (breathing, heartbeat, walking, the tension of skin over muscle). the moment a bubble fails, when it is in between being-bubble and oblivion. an alchemical leap rather than a scientific progression; folding-in-on-itself and twisting. repetition demonstrates to us how that which is apparently linear and logical is actually circular and sublime. for example, excellent music finds the frictions of life’s rhythms and synchronizes them into a metarhythm (which is greater than the sum of its parts) that bends back around to show us how the supposedly banal repetitions it’s composed of are miraculous in their own right. we want to melt the signifier! a frictionless language! an eye-dropper, bottled hallucination!

Some gardens are pruned overzealously. Who did the landscaping in Eden? What type of garden do we want to live in, anyway? What type of garden would we be free in? I know that I feel brittle when I'm labeled, like dead soil. There are flower beds that we should tend to with a mother’s gentle hand. At the same time there is a lot to be learned from Jonathan Richman about subtlety; we should be open to the potential necessity of bulldozing some orchids, turning bad soil and making it new and good. We can plow our way through the doubt and the despair. We can shoot our way out, maybe, if we’re careful not to shoot our way back in. Somehow we’ll have to figure out how to do it in the name of love and good gardening.

. When we looked out the window as the wind blew big bottlecap-sized flakes of snow straight up towards the sky in the evening, and we were so pleased by that inversion of the way things normally are, and I could see the joy written on your face, I remembered that I love you.

. When we walked home from a party, stumbling a little bit, in the cold, and we saw a half-dozen deer, maybe the same ones that we saw driving back from the airport a month before, so graceful and poised, crossing the empty street, in the soft white lamplight, and you inhaled so sharply, I remembered that I love you.

. When we coated our noses and curled up together naked like twin birds in an egg, under the shell-colored down blanket that sheds feathers all over the bed, and touched each other’s hair, I remembered that I love you.

When I hear your boots on a stretch of stairs

my guts go into nautical knots

I was poisoned stomping after you in the snow

and your nose looked like a strawberry

you had a bomb stuck in your throat

Leave me here, leave me here, I’ll catch up with you later

my angel can’t get her feet underneath her

she broke my fingers with a strung out smile 

my angel wants to see past the horizon

and I’m ashamed and nearsighted, my only love

is the ready loam in my innerspring garden

you’re jealous of my answers

and the tears that leak so easy

you told me i know how to live

but i'd so much rather...

if i could be a string on your guitar

a finger on your old leather glove

if i could be a feather in your pillow

i’d check out before breakfast

but i'd so much rather...

you can touch your heart to mine

you can warm me for a time

before i go i’d be remiss

to deny you a last kiss

and when i go i’ll leave behind

all the good that i could find

as a ghost in it i’ll linger

home at last, my host refined

When an animal is about to die, it goes away from the other animals. I have all of these people at arm’s length. I have all of these people that don’t seem to mind me. It goes away from the other animals. I have all of these people that I could never be honest with. Maybe the animal is just ashamed. I wish I could follow her around all day, like a ghost, without ever getting in her way. If I met God right now, I think I would embarrass myself horribly. I would say “... if that makes any sense” at the end of sentences, and I would say “sorry” without having anything to be sorry for. I would forget myself. God would be mortified by an animal this stiff. I hope that I get a chance to warm up a little before we meet.