Lost Words

Guessed wrong, turned back on after the storm front had moved through and lost power a while later. Lost some words. I don't know how many because they're lost. Sat in the dark for a while, cursing my inattention. Put on my headlamp and read myself, in preparation for recording tomorrow. It takes several pages for me to find the natural voice behind the words. Rather flat and un-accented. It's interesting to note that anything makes sense, apparently disparate thoughts connect. Otto Rank understood this better than anyone. Walter Benjamin. I was thinking about dying, a perfectly logical sequence that had followed from unrolling an actual rubbing of sweet Emily's grave, in preparation for framing, and what that would mean for the hanging of art-work in the house. What I see affects what I believe. There's a photograph over the kitchen sink, four poets in front of a back-hoe, two of them now dead, that I look at every morning when I make coffee. The location of this photograph was designed and built to display an image. For years it was a poem by McCord about a dead animal which I must have read a thousand times, now it's a photograph of dead poets. Stations of the cross. I have to say that writing The Cistern, I was in over my head. I can't actually write that well. It was a fluke, an aberration, enough monkeys and typewriters you end up with text. I have no idea what TR wants or expects, a bit like Cunningham and Cage worked, neither knowing what the other was thinking. Reality is such a complex equation. Usually I think that nothing makes any sense, then things flip, and everything makes sense, which is, more or less, the same. When I was writing The Cistern, I couldn't not make sense, everything fit, every nuance was spot on, I was on automatic pilot. I occur, a couple of times now, as a subject in a degree program, not unlike something grown as an example of what can happen if things go awry. As weather is prone, 75 degrees 24 hours ago and now it's 25 degrees and the house is creaking, hoar frost settles on the back porch, and I can't not think about the heat-death of the universe.